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From Makers to Manufacturing August 25th, 2015

July 22, 2015August 22, 2015Howard Lieberman

The SVII is happy to present another of our live events, From Makers to Manufacturing! This event will discuss the shortening time between the conception of an idea and the construction of the idea’s first model. By collapsing the distance between conception and creation more advancements can be made in less time, allowing for swifter advancement.

The kick-off event at our beautiful new space* is going to be great! We are lining up an amazing panel of guests, and look forward to a deep dialogue with participants old and new.

Envision a world where the time between an idea’s conception and its physical rendering is not months but hours. The industrial revolution launched the age of manufactured goods, but mass fabrication has always required a long and expensive setup, and the initial prototyping still required skilled handcrafting.

Babies grow too quickly for their prosthetics, people with old cars need parts long since out of production, inventors need a widget to do some unique thing that only they want to do.

What if anyone could make almost anything they can imagine, quickly and inexpensively? What might the “maker revolution” have in store for us in terms of our lifestyles and capabilities?

Tuesday, August 25th, 2015
7pm – 9pm (Doors open at 6pm)
Foothills Tennis & Swimming Club
3351 Miranda Avenue
Palo Alto, CA 94304

Join us in a provocative discussion!

Get your Tickets Here!

* Special thanks to the team at Foothills Tennis and Swim Club who are hosting us in this series. Read more about their sponsorship and this series in this letter from our founder.

PANELISTS:

Roland Krevitt, when in charge of tooling for Apple, invented machines to quantify computer smoothness, and scoured the world for the few companies who could meet his specification to permit them to be authorized Apple venders. Many types of products have passed through his tools. Before Apple, he did this at HP and afterward at Plantronics, a world leader in microphone and telephony systems.

Roland consults to a large range of high tech companies applying his unique history of bringing prototypes into mass production. When traveling abroad for all these companies, Roland’s extraordinary international experience has permitted him to make product decisions impacting many billions of dollars worth of products in numerous industries. He has a degree in mechanical engineering and an MBA.

Adam Rodnitzky is a serial entrepreneurial with a passion for startup marketing. He has co-founded three startups, two of which have been acquired: CompleteCar.com (acquired by CarParts.com in 2000), andReTel Technologies (acquired byShopperTrak in 2012). Adam leads marketing for Occipital, Inc., a Boulder, CO and San Francisco, CA based startup that creates state-of-the-art mobile computer vision software, as well as the recently launched Structure Sensor. Adam received his BA from Wesleyan University, and his MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Max Sims has expertise in design, business and computer graphics. He started as a car designer in Europe at GM and Renault. He then proceeded to work in movie special effects on films like Beetlejuice and Masters of the Universe. He has been an applications engineer and software product manager for Computer Aided Industrial Design software like Alias Autostudio and think3. Max has been the lead writer on a 900-page book called Inside Maya 5 while simultaneously designing the Natus Algo 3i. The medical device for Natus won both ID and Medical excellence awards. Sims executive produced for virtual worlds in Spain when he was also an Invited Professor at University of Salamanca. He is now working the field of electronic automotive user and branded design fiction experiences after graduating in a Masters of Design at California College of the Arts.

Note: Every month, it is our express desire to bring to you topics of interest, with a conversation started by a variety of subject matter experts. This interactive forum also counts on other attendees bringing up their perspectives as well, and not just a five minute question and answer session at the end. As always, our goal is to set the stage for a balanced interactive roundtable discussion. Although we seed the discussion with subject matter experts, the audience is also comprised of subject matter experts whose expertise lie in a larger range of topics. And it is within this cross fertilization of intelligent communication people that innovation can often occur. Change often originates from perspectives proffered from outside a field. We strongly encourage additional questions and points of view from everyone in the room.

Mission Driven Innovation

July 8, 2015July 8, 2015Howard Lieberman

Innovation that is related to a particular mission, can be even more powerful than that which is simply responding to solving a problem or driven by the desire to simply make money. Innovation is difficult in the best of circumstances, which is why it is usually accomplished by individuals who are driven. And not just driven to please their boss in the drive to get promoted, but driven by a mission.

What is the difference between ambition, problem solving and pursuing a mission or a vision? Missions and visions are bigger than individuals and organizations. They may be related to a philosophy which can sometimes be expressed as a tag line, such as “Bicycles for the Mind” which was Apple’s tagline early on when I attended Apple Developer University and was emblazoned on the large three ring binder of materials we were all given. I mention this as I would have never know this was Apple’s philosophy had they not disseminated it in this manner, as it did not show up elsewhere.

At the early Apple providing the “Bicycles for the Mind” mission enabled them to engage 30,000 developers creating software applications none of whom were on Apple’s payroll. By the way, Apple thirty years later, now has 1,000,000 registered developers a big part of the reason they can stay ahead of their competition. I am pointing this out not to glorify Apple, but to show having a terrific mission which can be expressed as a tagline that is an encapsulation of a larger meaningful philosophy, can be a powerful motivator for innovation. Apple is not the most valuable company in the world only because of design and ambition, but because that design and ambition were subordinated to a vision / mission. In contrast I would characterize Microsoft’s mission during its early years as “Deliver business capability”.

In short the missions of the two companies although each powerful were very different. Microsoft, founded April 1975 in Albuquerque, NM cared more about business than individuals.

Apple founded a year later April 1976 in Cupertino, CA was completely focused on empowering individual end users. Now Microsoft’s market cap in early July of 2015 is $358.53B and Apple’s market cap more than double at $726.7B. Of course there are multiple reasons for this besides mission, but mission contributed and still contributes in a nonlinear manner.

Another personal example from academia. Stanford University, a private institution founded in 1885, currently has over 16,000 students and the fourth largest endowment of $21.4 billion, just ahead of Princeton with $20B. Cogswell Polytechnical College also a private institution founded in 1887, and has 462 students and an endowment of $2M. One significant reason Stanford’s endowment is 10,000 times greater than Cogswell, with a student body only 40 times greater, is their founders stated very different missions. I am paraphrasing here because Cogswell has changed its mission and is now on a serious upswing. Henry Cogswell, a successful dentist and inventor of dental technology, wanted to provide “a technical education to working people” and Leland Stanford a tycoon, industrialist and politician wanted to provide; “learning …. of the highest grade”.

Both schools were both founded in the mid 1880’s, Cogswell in San Francisco and Stanford just a little south, with roughly the same $1M endowment but very different missions. The pursuit of turning out employable graduates vs. the pursuit of excellence, certainly influenced the current reality that Stanford’s endowment is now $1.25M per student and Cogswell’s is $4,330!

Having an excellent mission is incredibly important to any entity seeking to provide value to the world.

Innovation Leadership Issues July 2015

July 6, 2015July 8, 2015Howard Lieberman

There is a very large difference between leadership and management. Although leaders often tend to need to manage as well, at times they can delegate this responsibility away to stay focused on leadership. Of course leaders do have to work hard to manage themselves, which can be difficult especially in the opportunistic phases, where projects or initiatives getting underway usually have more unknowns than knowns.

There are intrinsic conflicts between innovation and management. Innovation demands maximal degrees of freedom and management demands risk aversion. Innovators need to be rewarded for taking chances. Often, managers are rewarded for not taking chances. Also it is very difficult for a creative person to be inspired by a person who has very little power to change trajectory, which necessarily is often the case for managers, especially middle managers who can be terrified of the crazy-making innovators exhibit.

Crazy-making you say? Yes. Lets put it another way, rational human beings usually accept the world around them and try very hard to work within its constraints. Then the are those who seem to be somewhat allergic to the status quo, and who at every turn are noticing ways to make “improvements”. These “improvements” usually require change. Sometimes, change alters the balance of power, or schedule, or budget – all activities which usually get a manager reprimanded. So innovators do tend to frighten control freaks because they are not very controllable.

Of course there are excellent organizations built upon “Innovation Cultures” where innovation is very much supported and that makes all of the difference. Having had the good fortune to spend fifteen years working at Bose and then at Apple, I got to spend many of my professionally formative years, within two very strong corporate innovation cultures. These were, and are, excellent training grounds for innovation leaders, even though as a younger crazy-making person, I always wanted to go faster and change more than was possible. Fortunately both Apple and Bose were on the lookout for new ideas, and tried to accommodate people who passionately wanted to move toward the future. When trying to convince Amar Bose one day of my desire to pursue developing a new product idea I had right now, because of the narrow “window of opportunity”, he laughed and said when he founded Bose there were already 75 speaker companies and now there were 300 and Bose Corporation was worth almost all of them combined because in everything we did we had to strive to be unique and to be the best.

A company’s culture tremendously reflects the founder’s values, especially when the founder(s) is still alive. Amar Bose and Steve Jobs were all about innovation and tended to only hire people who also felt that way. Only time can tell how well these values ultimately stick as companies scale up to having thousands of employees.

Companies like HP have not fared as well in this dimension, as they could have, under several new leaders that not nearly as embracing of innovation as Dave Hewlett and Bill Packard, even though one of them integrated the word Innovation into their logo tag line, put it on the signs outside their buildings, and has declared “Innovation is Priority One at HP”. New management locking the parts lockers that engineers previously could raid for any project – authorized or not certainly stifled innovation, as many new product ideas came from unapproved projects. Neither Bill nor Dave would have permitted this creativity repression as they explicitly created an innovation culture and when one of them I forget which discovered a lock on the parts room, he went and got a bolt cutter and cut it off.

Innovation is much more about audacity, and failing forward, than about tag lines and signs. Innovation is a stance about how to to be in the world every day, and is always adapting to the present moment. It is not something that is scheduled by declaring this year “lets be innovative”. Innovation DNA and Innovation Vitality are intrinsic, and as such not very subject to being turned on or off any more than than you can declare this year “I will become a curious person”. People are either curious or they are not. And if they are not, they are not going to make very good innovators, innovation leaders or innovation advocates.

Innovation is a completely natural response for all of us, until or unless it is beat out of us, usually by someone older than we are when we are young. When a creative person has the good fortune to be raised by parents who support them acting upon their insights, they can become somewhat inoculated to the resistance they will likely experience as they enter the work force unless they have the good fortune to join one of the rare companies with an innovation culture.

Founder Dropouts. A case for Innovation Leadership.

July 5, 2015July 8, 2015Howard Lieberman

Lets face it many gifted, creative, exceptional people generally have issues with authority. The act of innovation, generally requires one to take a stance that rejects the way things are, in favor of the way things could be. Do you see this pattern in yourself? Many of our greatest founders are dropouts. In a conversation, I had with Craig Venter the father of the Human Genome Project, he told me he had to quit working for the NIH ,where he was unable to get adequate support for the project to proceed and was forced to become an entrepreneur. I asked him if great change or breakthroughs ever came from within giant organizations, and he said something like “Never, you have to drop out of the mainstream to make anything big happen”. He was of course spectacularly successful and listed on Time magazine’s 2007 and 2008 Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world. In 2010, the British magazine New Statesman listed Craig Venter at 14th in the list of The World’s 50 Most Influential Figures 2010.

We all know stories like this including Apple, Google and FaceBook to name a few of the smaller companies on the planet. Of course there are probably 10,000 failures for each of these successes. Dropping out is certainly no guarantee of getting anywhere and usually does not. But if you have a great idea, perform due diligence to reality test it, use your critical thinking skills and work hard to accumulate enough evidence that you may be right while the rest of the world may be wrong, you eventually have to go for it even in the face of hidden pitfalls.

Here is one of them. Innovation has become a buzzword mantra in spite of most professional business people trying to eliminate risk as they are duty bound to pursue. A logical stance is “well we have to mange these people and this situation”. As the founder chairman of SVII for ten years I have been asked, initially to my amazement, hundreds of times “what is the algorithm for innovation?” Managing innovation is incredibly difficult because managing innovators is pretty much impossible. In the case of incremental, it can be done but in disruptive innovation where juicy exciting projects live, it is somewhat oxymoronic.

On the other hand, another word for some of us who are regarded as unmanageable, and that word is leader. It may be a mostly impossible dream to manage breakthrough innovation, but at times the person with insight, also has both enough passion and enough discipline to lead it. Lets face it, one person size dreams may work well for some of the creative community, including artists, musicians, writers and coders of computer applications as well. After we hit it out of the park successfully manifesting our one person size dream, our dreams tend to grow larger and soon we realize we need help, a lot of help. Then because we may have had a hard time accepting authority, we may be reluctant to wield it to the dismay of the people who are trying to follow us.

Leadership is a service profession. You have to take care of all of your stakeholders including your followers. The bigger the dream, the more you generally need help. Sorry, you do not have a choice, as soon as you have a terrific insight that is going to require significant help, you are going to have to lead.

Being an innovation leader is extremely rewarding, as well as extremely frustrating, because you know what was said earlier about gifted, creative, exceptional people who generally have issues with authority. However you have a secret weapon, you are them! You know what they need and how they need to be treated. There is no one more qualified to lead innovation, than an innovator. And this is when the dropout becomes a drop-in.