Posted by Adam Gordon on Jan 18, 2011 in all, innovation, leadership, lifestyles & values, technology change
A photo exhibition, Facing the Impossible, opened at the end of last year in New York. (425 Broadway, 5th floor, NY 10013; to 28 February 2011.)
Just another photography exhibition in NYC? Well, not quite. It’s an industry foresight story too – the survival and revival of Polaroid analog instant photography in a digital world.
Polaroid, for those too young to have heard of it, is a camera system that produces a picture in a few minutes out the back of the camera, no darkroom required.
Polaroid US brought out its first camera in 1948. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2008, closing down its last production plant in Enschede, Netherlands, making 180 employees redundant. But a group of entrepreneurs and ex-employees calling themselves The Impossible Project acquired the plant and have set about making (and improving) Polaroid film. The company reports that 500,000 packs of film, retailing from $15 to over $100 per pack for Polaroid cameras was sold this year. Revenue for 2010 was more than $10m and the number of ex-employees on staff has grown from 10 to 30.
Now a $10m turnover and 30 employees is hardly a business number of consequence for the world. The point is, conventional wisdom says it should not exist at all. Even Kodak stopped making Kodachrome this year, after 70 years. How can anyone be growing sales of analog film in 2010?
The Message in Red Ink
One might say Polaroid US head office could be forgiven for assuming digital media completely trumped its product and exiting the market. But should shareholders be forgiving? Yes the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy amid various complex management issues, but at its heart, red ink is always the product of inability to see and adapt to the future in time (or poor execution, or both.)
What The Impossible Project saw, that Polaroid itself could not see, was that niche, expert, aficionado secondary markets often remain extant and lucrative well after the mass market has moved on. Of course digital photography is the mass product-and-service market of the future. But in the rush to the future, lucrative pockets of specialization remain and this is one of them.
This principle can be seen in the media industry as a whole. Records and record players have not gone away in a CD and iPod world, they have moved to aficionado markets. Printed books and magazines are going this way too. They won’t disappear but they will be a format for niche uses. This is true across other industries and across history too: transportation, for example, has seen eras when horses and bicycles were primary modes of working transport. Their primary function changed, but this opened up lucrative secondary, leisure, and niche industries.
In adapting to the future, opportunities exist in taking retiring mass-market solutions into new industries, or upmarket into niche areas of the same industry.
Creative Adaptation
The irony in this story is that the Polaroid camera and film was always a niche product. It fought giants Kodak and Fuji for a piece of the mass market in analog photography but never became a mass-market solution. (Its competitive advantage was instant-ness; its disadvantage was price and relative quality.) So it didn’t require any great “shift in DNA” by the company leadership to make the moves that Impossible has. But it did require a leadership willingness towards industry foresight and creative adaptation.
Impossible is doing the basics of providing (and improving) film to Polaroid’s installed base of users. It estimates that 300 million working Polaroid cameras still exist. This is the legacy factor. The future doesn’t move as fast as we think.
But more importantly, Impossible is also actively building a future for itself in its new niche — broader artistic and creative industries. In addition to its project space in New York, it has one in Tokyo (and had an exhibition during the Arles Photography Festival.) It is using these spaces as hub for soliciting alliances across visual creative media, promoting analog instant photography in its relationship with other creative industries, including growing beyond Polaroid’s static image legacy.
Promotional projects during the year included the creation of a special film edition with HUGE magazine (Japan), participation at Photokina 2010 Germany with the first 20×24 camera, and cooperation with the band The Decemberists — all growing the future of the product, reaching out to new users and a whole new generation of users.
Posted by Adam Gordon on Dec 16, 2010 in all, innovation, lifestyles & values, social change, technology change
I recently got caught in front of a video on the Future of Money shown at the banking industry conference, Sibos (SWIFT International Banking Operations Seminar) in Amsterdam.
Source: tradefinance-jobs.com
I’d give the video a miss. It’s Gen-Y dude-immersion to the like, max, and what co-producer Venessa Miemis has to say is much more effectively communicated on her site, which is:
“All the decisions about where I spend my time, attention, and money say something about me. For example: I buy organic food from local farms and products and services from local businesses —(I believe in building resilient communities by supporting local economy.) I have a garden, I fish, I hunt, I brew beer— (I find empowerment, gratification, and joy from understanding where food comes from and how to get it myself.) I recycle—(I understand that we live on a planet with finite resources and I want to reduce my impact.) I don’t shop at Wal-Mart. – (I prefer not to buy products that were produced in a country where people’s labor had to be exploited so I could “save” a dollar.)”
The well-identified trend to ethical consumption is at work here, but Miemis is actually expressing a far bigger consumer trend that in industry foresight workshops I call “identity-building consumption” (which may or may not be ethical.) Ref: “All the decisions about where I spend my time, attention, and money say something about me.”
Miemis continues: “Now, what does my bank say about me? Nothing.”
How might a bank go about articulating customer identity?
“Transparency… All I know about the way my bank works is that I deposit my money there, and then they take that money and go make money off of it. Where is that money going? Where is it being invested? Can I have control over how you use my money? Can I set a standard of where I allow you to invest my money, so I can be proud to say my money is being invested in green technology, or local initiatives, or anything that I care about?
“Intelligent Investing Opportunities… Show me opportunities where I can micro-invest in things I care about. Recommend ways I can save money on the things I already buy regularly. Show me how I can leverage my network and invest with a whole swarm of people. (Think Groupon for investing.) And then make each of these investments a part of my digital identity. I WANT people to know. I’ll wear it like a badge. Give me a service that empowers me to invest intelligently and in a way that represents the ethics I believe in, and I’ll tell everybody about it. This information will become part of ‘Social Credit Score,’ which will be more important than our current credit scores one day.
“Social Network Analysis for Co-Production Opportunities… There are a lot of people out there who want to cooperate and collaborate in order to manifest something together and make their lives and the world a better place. How do we find each other? Could a BANK help hook us up and then provide us with the information and resources we need to take an idea to action? Could we display projects we want to work on that are socially responsible and environmentally sustainable, and the bank links us to the investors that can help actualize it?”
Miemes rails against how at Sibos her “Innotribe’s” manifesto was met with no more than a polite “there-there” pat-on-the-head from gray-haired bankers. That’s to be expected. But if there is a solid principle in industry foresight, it is that the next generation wins in the long run (and the long run is becoming shorter.)
Retail banking, like just about every other retail industry, is being sucked with new generations into Web 2.0, the “Social Web.”
And the Social Web is, fundamentally, a self- (and group) identity-building and identity-expression machine.
So the banking sector has to prepare for a near-term future where it plays an active role in the identity construction and identity articulation of its customers. Here they are shown some important ways to do it. That is, they have been gifted a blueprint of the future of their industry.
read morePosted by Adam Gordon on Aug 19, 2010 in all, foresight tools & methods, lifestyles & values, politics of the future, strategic foresight
Today I offer a rather naked punt for a site called “Global Voices,” but there is a solid foresight methods reason for doing it.
In its own words: “Global Voices is a community of more than 300 bloggers and translators around the world who work together to bring you reports from blogs and citizen media everywhere, with emphasis on voices that are not ordinarily heard in international mainstream media. Global Voices seeks to aggregate, curate, and amplify the global conversation online – shining light on places and people other media often ignore. We work to develop tools, institutions and relationships that will help all voices, everywhere, to be heard.”
There are of course other places to get local-blog perspectives on current issues and concerns, but this site appears to be the broadest and best, at least at the moment.
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Why is this important for thinking adequately about the future?
The biggest problem we have in foresight work is the double-whammy that (a) people, on aggregate, choose and make the future, and (b) we don’t know what they will choose because we don’t adequately listen to their concerns and motivations, or worse, are we are deaf to their motivations because they are outside of our frame of reference.
(a) Yes, the future is influenced by new capabilities, driven by new technologies, but technologies come out of societal perspectives (what are we going to invest in or research towards?) and then adoption (which technologies “make it”) is all about social and economic choices. So what defines the future is what most people want. (Not everyone wants the same thing: that’s what politics is about.)
(b) Share of voice is political too, and in our world some people and companies have vast sway over media channels, but most have no voice. But just because they have no voice doesn’t mean they are not making choices as to (a) above. All it means is that if you’re not listening, the future will surprise you.
A “surprise future” = a lack of mental preparation. Without exception.
It is easier both practically and ideologically to listen to ourselves and our micro-communities of associates online or off, which confirms what we think and how we think. It’s much tougher to absorb alternative perspectives. Global Voices is not perfect. It is still, naturally, the preserve of the literate and educated. But it is a first step out of the frame.
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read morePosted by Adam Gordon on Jun 29, 2010 in all, foresight tools & methods, lifestyles & values, social change, strategic foresight, trend tracking
Anyone can see a trend – a pattern in the data, something waxing or waning in the world. You often see trend lists put out by research organizations or trend-tracking firms that itemize things on the march or in decline: people living in foreign countries up 10%; biodiversity down 30%; numbers of patents filed up 60%, and so on.
The harder task in achieving quality foresight is to judge across such lists what is really going to change the world and therefore the operating environment for most firms, and what is just, well, merely of passing interest. The true test is to get trend impact right, not merely to call the trend.
There is no exact science to this of course. But a good heuristic is to judge the strength of the trend (drivers for vs. blockers against) x change to status quo (how new is this really?) x number of people affected. In this regard, a recent FT article reports on a genuinely world-changing trend.
The story is about how Indian television stations, led by Murcdoch’s Star India and Viacom are writing more independent, assertive roles for women in soap operas to reflect new realities in the Indian middle class. They hope to renew viewer ratings, as this clip explains:
Source: FT.com
Star has recently launched Pratigya (Oath), about an ordinary girl who marries into a rich family and stands up to its chauvinist patriarchs, and Sasural Genda Phool, about a rich woman who marries into a middle-class family but insists on maintaining a modern life.
New womens’ roles and aspirations have permeated Western society in the past generation and a half, and have profoundly changed everything from dress to daycare. Now the other 5 billion are going there too.
I would not (I stress) expect the Western model to be followed to the letter. Cultures always interpret world trends and technologies their own way. But billions of girls are growing up to be unlike their mothers in key respects, and will demand industries — not just the media — move with them, and will reward those that do with unprecedented commercial opportunities. That’s a certain future.
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Posted by Adam Gordon on May 21, 2010 in all, design, innovation, lifestyles & values, scenario planning
I’m taken with these pictures of an experimental apartment created by institutes at the University of Karlsruhe, as featured in ArchDaily and Detail.
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The point is, this is not the future of housing. Many hyper-efficient solutions have been designed over the years — many such “machines for living in,” that worked perfectly as rational solutions but failed the social-market adoption test, and therefore did not become part of the future. The future is always what we (as a whole) choose from among what designers and technologists can create.
This prototype will fail it’s future-adoption test. Humans don’t live rationally. If I rolled my desk to the ceiling, I’d be showered with papers and headphones and flying coffee cups. You would too, no doubt.
Having said that, the inventive thinking here is intense and admirable. This prototype is like a good scenario in that it functions in the liminal zone between the plausible and implausible, allowing us to consider options and problems (and their solutions) that otherwise we would be blind to.
I can see some elements of this prototype finding their way into urban hyper-density new-build apartments, and when they do it will be fair to say the “futures thinking” was done here, in this project.
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Posted by Adam Gordon on Feb 25, 2010 in all, decision-making, economy & finance, lifestyles & values, management, strategic foresight
Charlie Munger, Vice-Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Corporation, the diversified investment firm chaired by Warren Buffett, has a piece titled: ‘Basically, it’s Over‘ in Slate this week.
Charles Munger
First, let me say, what I like about investors (and managers and entrepreneurs) with long-term track records of success, is it means — it must mean, by definition — they have a high quality view of the future. Not only a high-quality view, but a high quality view that renews itself. There is no doubt that Berkshire Hathaway has consistently over time had a better view of the future than most expert forecasters, policy pundits, and futurists. The record is clear.
Anyway, Munger this week offers a parable about Basicland, a C18 Pacific island colonized by Europeans where: “Property rights were greatly respected and strongly enforced. The banking system was simple… Almost no debt was used to purchase or carry securities or other investments, including real estate and tangible personal property… Speculation in Basicland’s security and commodity markets was always rigorously discouraged and remained small…
“(But) as their affluence and leisure time grew, Basicland’s citizens more and more whiled away their time in the excitement of casino gambling… Many of the gamblers were highly talented engineers attracted partly by casino poker but mostly by bets available in the bucket shop systems, with the bets now called “financial derivatives.”
And so it goes on, telling the history of America and the route to the Credit Crunch, and potential for new misery going forward, via this parable. He uses the parable as parables have always been used, to say something in ‘make-believe-land’ that cannot be said (or will not be heard) in reality. The folly of Basicland’s citizens and government is much easier to acknowledge than our own. Scenarios of the future are similar in function, similarly allowing mental and institutional ‘permission’ to think the unthinkable and ‘say the unsayable.
The worst investor in America
Munger wouldn’t be the first to say: “Change yer ways or ye be doomed.” Isaiah and many before and since have said that. Nor would he be the first old white guy to espouse traditional ways of doing things. We factor that in. But he does look to basics and basics are important in having a high-quality view of the future. They signal the limits of the excess and reversion-to-the-mean imperatives.
I remember in the 1990s, when I was living in Washington DC, and Warren Buffet was “the worst investor in America” for missing out on the dot.com boom and Nasdaq bonanza. He just stuck to his guns saying, time after time, ‘there are no fundamentals behind these valuations (aka, this is just a casino) and fundamentals will prevail, which of course they did.
Now the brains at Berkshire Hathaway are saying that forums where risk, debt, currencies, etc., are up for speculation are ‘casinos,’ and their players therefore gamblers (rather than, as they would have it, ‘investors), and that they produce little fundamental value and fundamentals will prevail.
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