Thailand Traffic Innovation
For the last 3 weeks I’ve been in Thailand. As I always do I look for innovations or different approaches to innovation. Thailand is a very decentralized nation. This seems to contradict the extreme nationalism but things here don’t get done on a centralized basis. The bulk of activity happens at the personal and family level.
Any place you go there is someone selling something. Go to the park and there is someone renting mats to sit on the grass. Walk down the sidewalk and there are hundreds of food carts and other miscellaneous things for sale. And on the roads there is extreme variety. Bicycles, push carts, motorcycles, tuk tuks, cars, trucks converted in to buses, mini-buses, full sized buses and trucks. You might even see an elephant.
It’s well known that Bangkok traffic is some of the worst in the world. It took me 4 hours to ride a bus 6 miles (12 km). They don’t even bother having schedules because it is impossible for a bus or a car to know how long it will take to get anywhere in Bangkok. This is a huge drag on productivity. But rather than complain, Thais find their own individual solution.
Family of Four on Motorbike in Thaialnd
My second home is Chicago and even though Chicago has nearly double the population density of Bangkok traffic runs very smoothly. Chicago’s traffic problems are mainly during rush hour on the expressways leading into or out of the city and surrounding sports stadiums before and after a game. Chicago has a subway and elevated, and buses that show up every ten minutes and you don’t have to negotiate the price of riding a taxi. Chicago is very organized and centrally controlled.
Am I suggesting Bangkok become more centralized? No. The centralized control is not what makes Chicago work. It’s the variety of options available to the individual. But didn’t I say that Bangkok has more options? Actually no. Even though there are many different types of vehicles they all have to travel the same path. The only way to travel through Bangkok is the city streets. If the roads are crowded in Chicago you can take the subway or light rail. You can drive on the city streets or the free way or the toll-expressway. And the buses have dedicated lanes.
The motorbikes in Bangkok have found an alternative road, the space between cars. When cars, trucks and buses are stopped the motorbikes drive between. Motorbikes don’t compete for the roads with the larger vehicles. The motorbikes are able to use an over looked resource, the small space between vehicles.
The motorbikes also follow another important aspect of successful innovation. An individual can easily purchase a motorbike. For the price of one months rent you can buy a motorbike. It does not require a large investment and switching to motorbikes can be done one person at a time. Incremental investment but huge gains for the person choosing a motorbike.
Bangkok has one elevated train called the Sky Way and a second Sky Way line under construction. The Sky Way is the nicest train I’ve every seen. It greatly helps those who want to travel along the line but it doesn’t do much good for others. The Sky Way is extremely expensive to build and doesn’t help anyone until the whole thing is completed. This is high cost and high risk.
One of the reasons the personal computer revolution and now the Internet has been so successful for innovation is nearly anyone can try something. The barriers to entry are very low and the rewards can be extremely high. Decentralized or at least distributed systems are much more likely to result in successful innovation. The “moon mission” approach usually fails. One of the big benefits of Predictive Innovation Method is it reveals all the alternatives. This allows you to build towards a large end goal but do it with small and progressively successful steps. That reduces risk, maximizes profits and eliminates the threat of competition.
Why Six Sigma Fails Detroit
Kano Model
Michigan desperately needs innovation to be competitive. When Japan started using Statistical Process Control (SPC) now known as Six Sigma, it was a competitive differentiator. In other words Japanese auto makers used quality and lean process as an innovation. Detroit has been feverishly implementing Six Sigma but they are still losing ground to the Japanese and now the Koreans and soon to be China. Why?
Six Sigma is a great thing but doing it as a “me-too”? only creates commoditization. Worse yet, the entire process of Six Sigma is about doing the same thing cheaper and cheaper. That leaves you in a death spiral to the lowest priced product, and little or no profits. Does that sound familiar?
Detroit, Michigan and the USA in general need innovation. Everyone knows that but almost no one is really doing it. The main reason is they don’t know how. What if innovation could be as predictable and systematic as Six Sigma? What if a company could create practical, profitable innovations on demand? Does that sound fantastic? Impossible?!? It is fantastic and it’s absolutely possible.
Predictive Innovation makes innovation:
- Efficient
- Low-Risk
- Controllable
- Repeatable
- Competitive
- Reliable
- Just-In-Time
Rather than looking at innovation as a magical creative activity it uses the very well defined study of System Theory and new breakthroughs in Information Theory to create a step-by-step process for innovation. How systematic is it? How about knowing there are 7 specific elements to innovate in any product or service and there are 15 types of alternatives for each element? When you realize that, you are guaranteed 105 innovations targeted precisely to your business needs and your customer’s desires.
When you use Predictive Innovation you can create an innovation strategy that causes your profit margins to increase overtime, risks to decrease and eliminate the threat of any competition.
Predictive Innovation has been used to create entire families of products, increase the value of investments, and solve seemingly impossible problems. It’s been applied to manufacturing, software, medicine, marketing, security, business strategy, politics, and entertainment.
How are Predictive Innovation® and Evangelism Marketing related?
The world business environment has fundamentally changed Customers can now both find and filter information to get what they want. This means traditional interrupt based advertisement is losing its effectiveness. At the same time customers can search the entire world for exactly what they want. Technology is also making it possible for customers to easily build more of what they want for themselves. So to succeed you need to:
Provide exactly what the customer wants, when the customer wants it, in the way the customer wants, and for the price the customer is willing to pay.
And you must communicate to customers you have what they desire while the customer is actively trying to ignore you because so many others are trying to get their attention.
Innovation gets you half way, but you can’t just innovate, you must Predicatively Innovate to stay ahead of the competition. And how do you communicate something new to people who are ignoring you? Search based marketing won’t work very well because people must first know something exists in order to search for it. That is why Evangelism Marketing is so important.
The great news is Evangelism Marketing doesn’t just introduce a new product; it builds the confidence of each level of user from early adopter to mainstream to late comers. But it’s not just a technique for selling. Evangelism Marketing guides the processes of innovation. In order to get customer to freely sell your product for you, you must first Make them so happy they want to do it. Giving them exactly what they want when they want how they want in the way they want for the price they are willing to pay is essential to Evangelism Marketing.
Evangelism Marketing is a relationship. You are helping someone by giving them information. They in turn give you back information and continue to spread the information you gave them. You might say surveys and marketing research does that, but it doesn’t. How do you get someone to take a survey? Often you can’t. Even with bribes it’s hard and the data is frequently heavily skewed. What about getting customers to freely spread the message? Traditional top down concepts don’t work in a distributed environment. More power, more widely spread is the wave of the future. There are HUGE opportunities for people willing to embrace it and horrible disruption for those that cling to the old way. Which will you be?
Predictive Innovation Training
Predictive Innovation: Core Skills Book
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