Archive for April, 2016

Business Insight – The Innovation Agenda

Monday, April 25th, 2016

The Innovation Agenda
By Roger La Salle

The Innovation Agenda
In Australia the new Prime Minister is strong on innovation, we are to be the innovation economy. This is great news, but why don’t we actually innovate instead of just talking about it – the mind boggles, it’s always more of the same.

A Case in Point
Despite our talk of innovation, what we see in Australia like in most developed countries is that innovation is entirely lacking when it comes to solving one of the biggest problems – traffic.

Even in Australia a country with really only two well populated cities and just 22 million people, over 1.5 million new cars are sold every year, and with the life of a car running at ten plus years all we see are ever growing traffic queues.

Will roads fix that?
Of course the common and simplistic solution proffered by Government is to make car access more difficult by providing more bike lanes, seldom used to anywhere near the downside effect they have on traffic flow, or financial penalties for entering the city precinct with tolls and car parking levies.

Quite simply this is crazy stuff which does little more than frustrate workers and put them at odds with their governments.

The other tried and failed approaches include building more roads and wider freeways, or improved public transport.

Sorry to say, all of these are costly failures.

In the case of more roads, people that tire of traffic snarls turn to overcrowded public transport. Meanwhile the government widens and builds more roads, the result is that traffic flow improves, so people revert to old habits, back to road travel and the consequent log jam of traffic. It’s a never ending cycle.

As for public transport, there is simply insufficient capacity and even if there was, there is no place to park at public transport hubs and of course the traffic to these, assuming there was sufficient parking, would again be gridlocked.

What’s the Innovation?
We are told that high speed internet is the answer to the world’s problems and in the case of traffic, this is indeed the case.

If you walk into any inner city office all you will see are people perched over computers doing their jobs or speaking on telephones. The question must be asked, “why do they have to be centrally located?” Simply, they don’t.

With proper internet access and good multimedia 90% or more of these people could work from home and maybe attend the office once a week or even less to keep in social contact with other staff.

In reality, the only people that need to be in the city are those needing a personal customer interface, like bank tellers, doctors, dentists, shopkeepers and restaurateurs. The rest could be at home being much more productive and saving hours per day in travel time with a lot less energy wasted in frustration waiting in traffic queues.

So what’s lacking?
In essence what’s lacking is a proper management reporting method so people’s performance can be managed from afar with little need for personal interface.

Such reporting is easy to do, all it takes is a proper understanding of how to put metrics around job functions, a method embodied in the innovation of “The Principle of Contradictory Reporting”.

It’s that easy is it?
Yes – the answer is simple, the effect dramatic and the extra revenue to government coffers provided by restraining road works would be enormous.

If you wish to be the Innovation Economy – then for heaven’s sake – think like an Innovator?

**** END ****

Roger La Salle, trains people in innovation, marketing and the new emerging art of Opportunity Capture. “Matrix Thinking”™ is now used in organizations in more than 29 countries. He is sought after as a speaker on Innovation, Opportunity and business development and is the author of four books and a Director and former CEO of the Innovation Centre of Victoria (INNOVIC) as well as a number of companies both in Australia and overseas. He has been responsible for a number of successful technology start-ups and in 2004 was a regular panelist on the ABC New Inventors TV program. In 2005 he was appointed to the “Chair of Innovation” at “The Queens University” in Belfast. www.matrixthinking.com

SocialTwist Tell-a-Friend

Business Insight – Is it Innovation or Research?

Monday, April 4th, 2016

Is it Innovation or Research?
By Roger La Salle
Setting the scene!
To preface this article the following TED talk may be worth a watch, (although I did give this link in the last article). This talk shows some of our energy problems and is a real laugh as you get into it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kg1lFjRKKHY

A little one sided
The ABC in Australia recently screened a program on the virtues of home battery power storage. Unfortunately they failed to once mention that with present technology there is absolutely no financial payback for such a system. Further, even a 10kWhour battery would have insufficient power to cook a single large family roast dinner.

Of course the charging of batteries can be from solar panels but no mention was made of the cost of these or the need to keep them clean or that in Australia even the most sun drenched place has only 36% of full sun hours. To their credit the program highlighted the great benefit of off peak charging from the grid.

No doubt that in the fullness of time local power will be the order of the day. How long it takes us to get there is anybody’s guess but one thing is certain, whilst this technology is being rolled out, with vast subsidies, power prices are being forced up and tax payers worldwide are footing the bill whether or not you embrace this technology. Much the same of course can be said of the power from the ever growing array of wind farms.

On the positive side one may think this will eventually lead to the extinction of the ugly, expensive and fire prone poles and wires – not so.

More poles and wires are being installed every day to support the growing farms of wind generators, again subsidised by the taxpayer.

Personally, I am all for renewables, but at what cost and who is driving this agenda and what is the effect on power hungry industries such as aluminium manufacture or smelting and the like. Is this agenda killing industries in developed countries, industries that make essential products that are not then removed from the face of the earth but simply relocated to lower cost countries with the nett effect on carbon emissions being the same or more likely, even worse.

Can it work anywhere?
Presently I am involved in a project that uses battery power, supplemented in some small way by the grid, but this is a commercial application with real payback, a positive value proposition. That makes it workable and different and we don’t need any government subsidy to make it workable.

Innovation – the way forward
Anybody that knows me recognises I am a champion of innovation, but in the commercial world innovations need to stand on their own legs.

Innovation is about “change that adds value”, otherwise it’s called research.

**** END ****

Roger La Salle, trains people in innovation, marketing and the new emerging art of Opportunity Capture. “Matrix Thinking”™ is now used in organizations in more than 29 countries. He is sought after as a speaker on Innovation, Opportunity and business development and is the author of four books and a Director and former CEO of the Innovation Centre of Victoria (INNOVIC) as well as a number of companies both in Australia and overseas. He has been responsible for a number of successful technology start-ups and in 2004 was a regular panelist on the ABC New Inventors TV program. In 2005 he was appointed to the “Chair of Innovation” at “The Queens University” in Belfast. www.matrixthinking.com

SocialTwist Tell-a-Friend