Читать книгу The Exponential Era - David Espindola - Страница 19

SPX helps organizations identify, explore, monitor, and intercept “horizons” – the changing trends and the technology convergences that can be hugely advantageous to the business if caught early enough, allowing timely and targeted investments, or disastrous if recognized too late, regardless of how much investment is made attempting to catch up.

The premise behind SPX is that it is possible to detect the early signals of transformative disruptions and to map risks, opportunities, and capabilities, allowing the creation and prioritization of actionable plans designed early enough to keep ahead of exponential change. Let's make one thing clear. We are not suggesting that SPX will help companies predict the future. What SPX does is help companies navigate through this new era of swift changes in technology, business, and society. It does this by monitoring the early signals that help anticipate changes and by mapping risks, opportunities, and capabilities, facilitating the prioritization of actionable plans to keep ahead of these changes.

Table I.1 Sample list of products shut down by Google.

Source: Data from Google Graveyard, Killed by Google.

Product	Description	Longevity
Google+	Google+ was an Internet‐based social network.	2011–2019
Inbox by Gmail	Inbox by Gmail aimed to improve email through several key features.	2015–2019
Picasa	Picasa was an image organizer and image viewer for organizing and editing digital photos.	2002–2015
Orkut	Orkut was a social network designed to help users meet new and old friends and maintain existing relationships.	2004–2014
Google Nexus	Google Nexus was Google's line of flagship Android phones, tablets, and accessories.	2010–2016
Glass OS	Glass OS (Google XE) was a version of Google's Android operating system designed for Google Glass.	2013–2017
Google Chrome apps	Google Chrome apps were hosted or packaged web applications that ran on the Google Chrome browser.	2010–2017
Google hands‐free	Google hands‐free was a mobile payment system that allowed users to pay their bills using Bluetooth to connect to payment terminals by saying “I'll pay with Google.”	2016–2017
Android @Home	Android @ Home allowed a user's device to discover, connect, and communicate with devices and appliances in the home.	2011–2015

Organizations that want to not only survive but thrive in the Exponential Era will have to embrace disruptive change and discontinuity. As uncomfortable as this may seem to companies with traditional business models and behaviors, with the right support from the senior management team, and the right shared values and frameworks, organizations can develop behaviors and cultures that embrace change. We see this type of culture in relative newcomers, like Facebook, where employees are told to “break things,” or Google, where employees can dedicate a portion of their time to work on projects of their choosing. Google is proud to disclose an extensive list of products and services that they decided to shut down. The website “killedbygoogle.com” lists 190 of these products and services as of this writing, and you can see a sample list in Table I.1. These shutdowns are not considered failures, but instead, they are indispensable experiments that guide Google in its never‐ending pursuit of what they refer to as “moonshots,” an attempt to create game‐changing products and platforms.

But it is not only newcomers like Facebook and Google that are capable of developing change‐centric cultures. As we have discussed, older, more entrenched organizations can also develop such cultures, albeit, in the cases of IBM and Microsoft it required a change at the CEO level.

Experimentation is an integral component of SPX. We believe that in response to fast changes in technology, organizations must implement small projects that are iterative in nature, and that run continuous short cycles. However, experimentation is not sufficient – it is just one aspect of exploration. We also believe that in order to identify business inflection points, organizations need to conduct research long in advance.

By using Artificial Intelligence to uncover new insights from patent databases, companies can identify leading indicators of emerging technologies that may have a future impact on their business. We will cover this topic in detail in Chapter 4 where we discuss the Predictive Analytics component of SPX.

To summarize, SPX provides leaders a clear methodology for innovation in the Exponential Era. Specific tools and guidance are included for a number of critical aspects of innovation: Ideation, as well as deep analysis, prioritization based on both risk and reward, market trends and competitive insights, fast iterations for both prototyping and commercialization, and knowing when to quit and when to stay in the game. This is all built upon a foundation of culture, behaviors, and executive engagement. Our goal is to help organizations embrace a process and mindset that deal effectively with continuous disruption and chaos. The word “continuous” has often been used within the context of continuous improvement and operational efficiency. Operational efficiency is not in the scope of SPX. We are also not interested in addressing incremental improvements. Instead, our focus is on disruptive changes, and the use of the word continuous is to emphasize a distinction between the iterative nature of SPX versus the discrete nature of traditional strategic planning.