IdeaPaint

Courtesy of Fast Company, here's one of those products that's so simple and obvious it's hard to believe no one saw it before. Cover your walls in IdeaPaint, and they turn into a whiteboard.

Is IdeaPaint an innovation, or just an invention? That depends on whether people want to switch to the new technology, which is cheaper and more flexible than conventional whiteboards, but which does need some extra prep work. It also depends on who fits out your office (or, gosh, home), and whether they'll go for the new process they'll need to apply, rather than install, this whiteboarding solution.

I like the idea of whiteboard paint, and I note that blackboard paint has been available for many a year. I also notice that despite the growth of online collaborative tools, most creative group work still gets done in rooms with pens. I guess the committed handyman could combine IdeaPaint with Johnny Lee's Wii whiteboard hack to create a physical/digital collaborative environment - or, at the least, a self-recording whiteboarding room.

Do Or Die? Do A Dyson

Jennifer Harris mentions the "Semmelweis Effect" in a recent Management Today piece. Semmelweis discovered that getting maternity ward doctors to wash their hands regularly cut the mortality rate of mothers from 18% to 1%. This was in 1847. He was ignored and ridiculed.

Harris says that successful people can become resistant to innovation because they begin to see success as a right, rather than the outcome of work and thought. "The way to prove them wrong is to do a Dyson," she says: that is, go off and do it anyway.

For organisations to establish innovation as a process, they need to question their own complaceny, traditions and superstitions. Change is as much, if not more, about loss than gain. Loss of status or hard-won expertise in the face of innovation is a very real, if rarely articulated, fear.

Leaders need to remind those around them that successful organisations practise rational decision making. They move forward on the basis of sound analysis of good data. If a new process demonstrates the kind of performance benefit that Semmelweis achieved, then it gets implemented - no matter how cherished the theories it displaces.

How is it, then, that so many organisations seem to survive on a mixture of irrational decision making, poor innovation and luck? The truth is that they're either burning off a stockpile of good will, market momentum and inherited assets, or they're working some kind of monopoly. Everybody else gets found out.

Deep Restaurant Maths

"GBK [Gourmet Burger Kitchen] is set to launch a new style of restaurant featuring smaller-sized burgers in an effort to encourage greater frequency of visits from customers."

I've been pondering this snippet from PR Week ever since I first read it a few days ago. Much as I love GBK, I don't buy the idea that offering smaller burgers will make people go there more often. I suppose it might work on a planet where the only source of sustenance was GBK.

Mobile entertainment apps: state of play

Neil Robertson has written a very useful summary of the current state of mobile entertainment apps, via Mobile Monday.

A Ratio in the Eye of the Beholder

The Economist reports that Spotify has 6m users of its free, ad-supported service but only a "puny" 40,000 subscribers to its paid, ad-free service.

How puny is this? It's a ratio of 150 non-payers to every paying customer.

Now, if you regard the 150 side of the house as freeloaders who ought to be contributing revenues, then this looks like a poor deal for Spotify. But those 150 ad-listeners are more like folks browsing in a shop than people indulging in shoplifting. In many businesses, a ratio of 150 tyre kickers to every one buyer would look attractive. And those kinds of businesses are big ticket businesses.

So, here's the thing: is Spotify a big ticket business or a small potatoes affair? We're so used to thinking of music in pocket money terms that it's easy to classify Spotify as a small stakes player - one that can't pay for a legion of onlookers and enquirers with the revenues of its customers.

But Spotify is actually in the lifetime value game. Sign someone up for a monthly subscription, and you have a relationship with them. You're their music service, not their record store.

The Creativity Measure that Counts

"96% of business leaders cite creativity as integral to business success and recovery from the recession, yet 44% say they lack the skills and commitment to deliver it."

Marketing Week, 16 July 2009.

Read this: Lost in Navigation

Ovum's Jeremy Green writes insightfully and entertainingly on the state of play in location-based services here.

Or do I mean "location-enabled"...? Possibly not: as Green points out, visitors to London's 2012 Olympics may well spurn location-enabled services, while a location-based service for asthma sufferers is doing rather well. You see, there is a difference...