The hit 80s movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High recently turned 35 years old. For anybody who grew up during that period, it evokes memories that are both nostalgic and quaint. Back then, social life revolved around, of all things, a shopping mall, where kids would go to shop, gossip and work.
Today, of course, you won’t find many kids hanging out at at mall. Why would they? They can shop, gossip and work online. Go to a shopping mall today and you’re more likely to find liquidation sales and empty stores. The ones that remain open tend to be understaffed and poorly trafficked.
Welcome to the retail apocalypse. The rise of e-commerce, combined with a shift in consumer preference towards dining out over shopping and years of overbuilding, has resulted in unprecedented retail closings. That’s clearly bad news for the affected retailers, but it might prove to be a boon to everyone else. Here’s how you can win from the downfall of retail.
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Chester Carlson worked on his idea for years. It was tough, messy work and when his wife tired of the putrid smells, sulfur fires and occasional explosions emanating from the kitchen, his experiments were exiled to a second floor apartment in a house his mother-in-law owned. It took years, but he came finally up with a working prototype.
He tried to sell his machine to the great corporations of the day, including GE, RCA and IBM, but to no avail. Eventually, he teamed up with the Haloid Corporation, which eventually changed its name to Xerox and in 1959, more than 20 years after Carlson began his quest, it launched the 914 copier and became one of America’s leading corporations.
“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas,” said the computing pioneer Howard Aiken. “If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.” The truth is that innovation needs combination and few ideas can make much of an impact alone. So if you want your ideas to amount to anything, you’re usually better off sharing them.
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When Google first announced its Glass prototype, complete with a snazzy video, it generated a lot of excitement. Through augmented reality projected onto the lenses, users could seamlessly navigate an urban landscape, send and receive messages and take photos and videos. It was a completely new way to interact with technology.
Yet criticism quickly erupted. Many were horrified that hordes of wandering techno-hipsters could be surreptitiously recording us. Others had safety concerns about everything from people being distracted while driving to the devices being hacked. Soon there was a brewing revolt against “Google Glassholes.”
Now, however, Wired reports that Google Glass is taking on a new life and gaining traction as an industrial tool. From factory floors to operating rooms, augmented reality is proving effective at improving productivity, safety and documenting procedures. There’s a lesson in all of this. When your idea is truly new and different, target the few, not the many.
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Apple’s new campus, Apple Park opened in April to both adulation and criticism. The Los Angeles Times’ architecture critic, upon seeing the original design, called it a “retrograde cocoon.” USA Today pointed out that opening up a glitzy new headquarters is often a signal of impending decline. Wired isn’t sure if it’s insanely great or just insane.
One thing that everyone can agree on is that the new campus is quintessentially Steve Jobs. Everything is designed — to excruciating detail — for not only aesthetic beauty, but for function and the end user. A new pizza box was even specifically designed so that the crust won’t get soggy as employees take a pie back to their office.
In a recent Harvard Business Review article, Jennifer Magnolfi, who researches hi-tech workspaces, explains how the new Apple headquarters acts as a functional workspace that supports the company’s style of innovation. This becomes even more clear when we compare the new campus to how other innovative organizations design their offices.
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Greg Mulholland didn’t take the typical route to getting his MBA. He had no background in banking or consulting and hadn’t even taken a business course as an undergraduate. After earning an Engineering degree from NC State and then a Masters Degree in Physics from Cambridge, he went to work as a materials scientist.
Yet after working at a small semiconductor company in North Carolina for a few years, he began to notice a strange disconnect. While it was crucial for companies to identify new materials that could lead to better products, very few executives were able to effectively interface with scientists like him. He saw an opportunity to become that nexus.
As it turned out, during Stanford MBA program’s “Admit Weekend,” he found a kindred spirit in Bryce Meredig, a newly minted PhD in Materials Science. Like Greg, Bryce thought that, with materials science heating up, there were opportunities to be unlocked. Today, their company, Citrine Informatics, hopes to revolutionize how we develop new products.
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The liberal activist Saul Alinsky observed that every revolution inspires a counterrevolution and, as if to prove his point, conservative Tea Party activists adopted his 1971 handbook, Rules for Radicals as a standard text. To extend the irony further still, Alinsky is rarely discussed in liberal movements today.
We’ve seen something similar unfold in recent weeks. An innocent woman, Heather Heyer, was killed at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, then a similar protest took place in Boston under the guise of “Free Speech. This time, the chants of the limited number of alt-right activists were drowned out by 40,000 counter-protesters.
This is the physics of change. Every action provokes a reaction. In my research of social movements throughout the world this pattern is remarkably consistent and the tennis match of ideologies can go on for years or even decades. What is also remarkably consistent is what it takes to end the cycle — the forging of a new agenda based on shared values.
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Every entrepreneur dreams of having that single moment of epiphany where everything falls into place. Many search for their entire careers for that one big idea that will make the difference between incredible success and frustrating mediocrity. Few ever find it and many that do end up crashing and burning along the way.
The truth is that innovation is never a single event and the “eureka moment” is largely a myth. Innovation always involves combinations, so it’s less a matter of coming up with a big idea than it is putting the right ideas together in order to solve a meaningful problem. That’s a process, not a moment.
That’s why instead of starting with an idea, it’s best to start by finding a good problem. Innovation is far more complex than most people give it credit for. It takes more than an idea to change the world. In fact, it often takes decades after an initial breakthrough for its impact to become clear. Innovation is an integrated process of exploration, iteration and execution.
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When Occupy Wall Street took over Zuccotti Park, in the heart of the financial district in Lower Manhattan, they inspired the nation and the world. Soon, similar protests soon began popping up in nearly 1000 cities in 82 countries. It was a massive outpouring, but within a few months the protesters had disappeared, achieving little if anything at all.
The Otpor Movement in Serbia began with much less fanfare. In the beginning, at least, it seemed to be made up of little more than teenage pranks. Yet within a few short years, they emerged victorious, ending the reign of dictator Slobodan Milošević. The contrast between Occupy and Otpor couldn’t be more stark.
As I explain in my TED talk, the difference in outcomes is no accident. The members of Otpor have since gone on to reproduce their results by training activists in other movements such as the Color Revolutions in Eastern Europe and the Arab Spring. Entrepreneurs who seek to create their own brand of transformational change can learn a lot from Otpor’s principles.
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In the 1970s, Route 128 outside Boston was considered to be the center of the tech world. Companies like Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), Data General and others disrupted the market for mainframes with new minicomputers that were smaller, cheaper and more agile. They seemed destined to dominate the information age.
Yet as AnnaLee Saxenian explained in her classic book, Regional Advantage, by the 1990s, the mantle had clearly passed to Silicon Valley. While the Boston firms were vertically integrated islands unto themselves, the Silicon Valley upstarts worked to integrate themselves into a ecosystem.
As Amazon’s recent purchase of Whole Foods highlighted, today just about every industry is facing many of the same forces that the Boston tech giants did 40 years ago. Unfortunately, many are making the same mistakes by thinking strictly in terms of proprietary advantage rather than building an industrial ecosystem and they will undoubtedly meet the same fate.
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The 2009 financial crash was a truly global crisis, but it hit few places as hard as Ukraine. Already weakened by infighting among the opposition forces that came to power in 2004, the crash was more than its fragile economy could take. Within a year, Viktor Yanukovych, a brutish and incompetent autocrat, rose to power.
It was a disaster, but it also was the beginning of change in a nation that had seemed impervious to it. The 2014 Euromaidan protests resulted in Yanukovych’s impeachment and the rise of a new western oriented government. The country in shambles and in heavy debt, reform was forced on it. Now, Ukraine is expected to return to economic growth this year.
It was also amid the turmoil of 2009 that I started Digital Tonto in my Kyiv apartment in August, eight years ago. To be honest, I didn’t expect much from it, but soon found that many people thought I had something to say and, this past year, I successfully launched my book, Mapping Innovation. So Happy Birthday Digital Tonto! Here are some of my favorite posts.
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