THE INNOVATION GAME

HOW DOES AN INNOVATOR INNOVATE?

Someone asked me recently how I know I have truly innovated?

To clarify, for those that do not know the difference. To innovate, is to devise something that is radically new to the world (novel), and is perceived to be unique and valuable by others, an incredibly rare and difficult thing to accomplish. Adding a new camera to a smart phone is not innovation, it is merely evolution, which is often confused with the former.?

Steve Jobs devised the first smart phone; a spectacular innovation, which catalysed a genuine market inflection point spawning all manner of digital use cases, and where the phrase "there is an app for that" comes from. Most B2C digital value propositions would not exist today without Steve's leap forward. What would your world look like without TikTok, 'X,' WhatsApp, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Google Maps, Tinder, or Spotify?

Did you also know, without the innovators at Xerox PARC in the 1970s, and 80s, there would be no gargantuan Apple, as we know it today, or indeed, Microsoft Windows? The world would also be absent Unicode and all subsequent mark up languages, including XML, and HTML; the graphical user interface; the mouse; screen icons; the laser printer, the list goes on. If Steve Jobs had not made the inspired decision to swap 100,000 pre-IPO shares for the Xerox Alto code, Apple would likely have remained a middle of the road application software vendor, and Bill Gates would still be attempting to sell MS-DOS upgrades to IBM.

In the beginning, making fire was the most important discovery of all time. It happened nearly two million years ago through the fortunate accident of a Homo erectus (upright man), most likely while knapping a piece of flint into a spearhead, it probably sparked onto a piece of dried grass and the rest is history; the Earth's population at the time was less than 60,000.

Discovering how to make fire ensured the survival of our species throughout the Pleistocene epoch (last ice age), which lasted for over 100,000 years. At the end of this glacial period, the global population had risen to just 1 million.

Many of our greatest discoveries and innovations were accidental —gravity, the wheel, and Penicillin to name but three.

Evidence indicates potters were using stone wheels around 3500 B.C. in Mesopotamia (Iraq) —300 years before someone figured out that they could stand them upright and use them for conveyance on carts and chariots.

Technological innovations however, such as Renaissance creative genius Leonardo da Vinci's Helicopter, or "Helical Air Screw," (c.1483), tend to require wider knowledge and creativity, mixed with a great deal of curiosity and inspired forethought.

So, if you can conceive of something radically novel, from essentially nothing other than an inspired idea, you are innovating. When I walk into a new business, I am often asked to develop a business plan, or market strategy. My first instinct is to analyse all legacy resources, such as the people, products, processes, and technology, to understand if they are being utilised to their maximum potential, or can I envisage any unexploited growth opportunities, including diversification through organic innovation?

Who am I to speak with any authority about innovation? Part creative, part polymath, part versatilist, I have the innate ability to see perspectives beyond the incremental improvement of what already exists, and can often envisage what is to come.

Adept at visualising how a concept might be crystallised, I architect the necessary interdependent relationships, and underlying processes —the decisions and events, the statuses, and the object queues; the logical data structure; data storage, catalogs, taxonomies, lexicons, and the various clustering algorithms that all come together to create something novel, which is perceived to be unique and valuable by others. I then evangelise the concept, prototype it (with a cohort of dedicated specialists), commercialise it, and take it to market.

It is true, you must begin with the end-game in mind. You must firstly visualise how your concept will enrich the lives of others and follow this by conducting substantive global research to determine if your proposition is indeed unique and valuable to the world.

Then, think again, because your journey will be arduous with no guarantee of success.

A WORD OF CAUTION, CORPORATE INNOVATION REQUIRES FORTITUDE TO BE SUCCESSFUL

It is not my intention to deter anyone of creative mind who may be inspired to innovate; just be aware, in any corporate environment one needs to tread very carefully indeed, because no matter how hard one tries to convince, encourage, and inspire everyone to embrace change, and join you on this new odyssey together, there will always be someone lurking in the shadows, who will vehemently disapprove of what you are trying to achieve, for whatever reason known only to them, and will most certainly try, by all means necessary to undermine you, while outwardly appearing to agree with you at every juncture.

SOME EXAMPLES OF MY WORK AS AN INNOVATOR

Example A - "An Organic Innovation"

I devised the integrated solution which enables you to access and consume internet content and services via your TV - DIVXTV? This catalysed a global market inflection point. Everyone in the world with a smart TV uses it today —without realising they even are.

DivX is a hyper laid-back media technology vendor, headquartered in San Diego, California. Their culture is very much early 'board meetings' at the La Jolla Shores point break when the swell is up; they even have a corporate 'board room' filled with Pearson Arrows for visitors, just in case they feel like catching a tube with their SoCal bros.

Working as a consultant serving the TMT industries, I was asked by Kevin Hell (CEO) to turnaround their EMEA entity. Sales had started to tail-off and he thought it might be a leadership issue. It was not; the root cause was market saturation. DivX provide fabless integrated encode/decode (CODEC) technology, digital compression, and media player solutions to 96% of all consumer electronics (CE) OEMs in the world. They had reached their macroeconomic saturation apex, meaning any incremental growth would be totally dependent upon the performance of their customers.

DivX desperately needed something new to excite the market.

Firstly, I explored a previously unfulfilled opportunity, by attempting to persuade the Blockbuster Video executive team to build a DivX digital storefront, emulating their brick-and-mortar retail experience, so they could compete online. I failed dismally, for the second time of asking; the first time, was years earlier during my tenure with Entriq, when video compression was in its infancy, and broadband —non-existent. At that time, we created a visually stunning proof of concept, only to be let down by the available technology of the day. Remember this? -

Blockbuster felt there was no future in internet video rental —"Our (65 million) customers across the world love coming into our stores; they enjoy the browsing experience, can rent a movie, and leave with some freshly made popcorn, a hotdog, candy, even something to drink."

If they had just said yes, Netflix would be history today, not the other way around.

—Everyone loved going to Blockbuster, it would have been the most natural migration to a digital storefront the world had ever seen.

After literally being laughed out of the Blockbuster offices, I reviewed all of the DivX legacy resources and realised the business could be radically diversified by offering access to internet content and services over a new integrated solution within consumer electronic devices, such as TVs, game consoles (PlayStation? Xbox?), Blu-ray? set-top-boxes, and Android? mobile devices, enabling secure, branded app connections to third party web services, while at the same time, offer user generated content upload to the Cloud for playback later via ones TV as an adjunct application, should DivX customers wish to add this functionality to their products. This would also be groundbreaking, because family and friends could access each other’s content as a shared service via their own TV; perfect for broadcast MSOs seeking novel, sticky services to eliminate double-digit subscriber churn.

As DivX had the most advanced H.264 and MPEG-4 compression technology in the world at the time, together with their own digital rights management public key infrastructure, my strategy was to devise something so radical, it would diversify the DivX business, and elevate the user experience by making it easy to consume protected internet content across multiple devices, so I presented my level 1 architecture to the executive team for approval.

After I left the company, in 2010 "DIVXTV" was born to the world, and adopted by their entire CE customer base, making it the most prolific solution they had ever released.

See the pop up banner at the base of this now smart Samsung TV screen and the top of the matched Samsung Android mobile device. If you use your TV to subscribe to any of these guys and many more, you are using my innovation.

DIVXTV had such a profound effect on the global digital media landscape, it immediately triggered a snowball of M&A activity. DivX was subsequently acquired several times over.

When I joined DivX, Netflix's revenue via PC distribution only was sub $1bn, with 9.1 million active subscribers. Today, post DIVXTV, their revenue is just shy of $40bn, and their active global subscriber count has ballooned to over 300 million. This "smart" IP revolution spawned many imitations by rival content owners wishing to cash-in. 1.8 billion users worldwide subscribe to online video streaming services today via their TVs and other IP 'connected' devices. This meteoric rise is expected to continue to 2.7 billion users by 2027, representing around 33.75% global penetration.

According to recent data, total revenue for video streaming services worldwide is estimated to be around $300 billion (2024), with the United States holding the largest share of the market.?

Real innovation often generates radical, even global consequences, not just for the user, sometimes it will entirely change the complexion of the industry, even the world —forever.

N.B., I naively signed a contract with an IP retention clause and NDA when I joined DivX, because I thought I was there to revitalise their European entity, nothing more; how wrong I was. Consequently, I received no acclaim, and not a single penny in royalties for this seminal innovation.

Indeed, the only acknowledgement I received, was a kind word in a LinkedIn profile recommendation from Mick Alene, a DivX founding employee, where he mentions my invention while working for them.

Now I know why Vincent thought himself a failure. His “I dream my painting, and then I paint my dream" ethos, is exactly the same as my inspiration to innovate; I just use a different kind of canvas. I hope, in years to come, people will look back, and find my creations to be as luminous as his.

Moral of this story: If you have a propensity to innovate, never sign a contract with an intellectual property (IP) retention clause, it will invariably end very unfavourably indeed.

Example B - "An Enterprise Experience Ecosystem"

A recent innovation was my creation of the world's first GenAI-powered enterprise 'closed-loop' case management solution for InMoment Inc, a leading vendor of customer experience (CX) and data analytics solutions.

???????????????????? - After making a brief initial assessment, I realised much of InMoment's business was tactical, because they were selling a mix of relatively low-cost applications and surveys to many customers across every industry, resulting in mainly 4-digit monthly recurring revenue. As their average customer tenure was less than two years, I thought I should devise an enterprise solution, which would substantially increase discernible value, tenure, and recurring revenue; this would ultimately become the keystone of any strategy.

???????????????? - If the best of their legacy technology could be combined with some novel business intelligence, active microeconomic insight analysis, and omnichannel enhancements, with case management at its core, this would render a new, very powerful and extensible, enterprise experience ecosystem, from touch-point to telemetry, ensuring increased recurring revenue by at least 10X, while simultaneously extending customer tenure by several years. InMoment would become as intrinsic to the success of their clientèle as billing, CRM, accounting, and ERP systems are today.

?????????????????????????????? - I devised a novel, cloud-native enterprise solution, bringing together the best of their legacy applications with my new case management, insight intelligence, omnichannel sentiment, and persona recognition ideas, giving them a novel solution, which would present an intrinsic, end-to-end value proposition now fittingly named ???????????????

This is why Resolve is so intrinsic to customer success

?????????????????? is an attitude, thought, or judgement, prompted by feeling, emotion, or individual idealism. It is the voice of the customer and is the basis of all of our nuanced communications.

Being able to capture and analyse sentiment can often provide us with valuable insights into an individual's temporary, but heartfelt state of mind. It allows us to step into their shoes for a fleeting moment in time to understand their emotions; to share their perspective about anything at all.

A customer's negative sentiment may be an evanescent reaction to a slightly adverse situation, but it could still have consequential reputational ramifications if it passes unheeded, as a negative experience for one person is often repeated and experienced by many.

Resolve continuously listens for negative and positive sentiment at the digital omnichannel in real-time; if the former is detected, it immediately initiates a timed case management cycle with predetermined mitigation measures matched specifically to the customer's distinct individual persona type.

???????????????? - There are 22 persona types so far identified, so when it comes to customer satisfaction, one size definitely does not fit all. Thankfully, from a customer experience case management perspective, there are only four distinct persona types that actually stand out —Competitive, Spontaneous, Humanistic, and Methodical, so building a detailed model of specific baseline characteristic parameters for each is relatively straightforward. This isn't the secret sauce however, the persona type still needs to be identified and matched using natural language processing technology, whilst being continuously optimised, using machine learning to update and perfect the model hyperparameters.

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Resolve has an artificial narrow intelligence (ANI) orchestration layer, incorporating natural language processing (NLP), and machine learning (ML) technology to identify, match, and perfect each persona type from unstructured human utterances and inferences, regardless of being derived from speech, or text in multiple languages. It is radically different from any other enterprise CX solution, because once negative sentiment is identified, it proactively initiates an active case and autonomously selects, and presents to the escalation team, a predetermined series of evolving, nuanced mitigation measures matched specifically to the customers distinct individual persona type, ensuring each person is treated in accord with their very own idiosyncratic range of sensibilities. Thus, an enhanced perception of empathy and care is imbued within anyone it touches —from one human to another.

Resolve goes one step beyond the capability of a typical generative solution, because it does not rely upon a human prompt to categorise appropriate mitigation measures.

?????????????? - InMoment's ethos is about listening to customers stories. People prefer to be listened to, rather than be bombarded with meaningless surveys asking only those questions which a business wishes to know. Isn't it better to allow people to tell you how they feel about any given situation, so you might make changes quickly to improve their experience?

Resolve autonomously analyses written customer stories for negative and positive sentiment in real-time, as well as by using speech-to-text transposition in multiple languages, from digital voice recordings and video feedback.

CEOs can now review a short showreel of actual customers telling them how they feel about their company by location, age group, product, service, and subject category e.g., quality of service, quality of customer interaction, quality of product, value for money, cleanliness etc, the good, the bad and the ugly. Video feedback has proven invaluable, as it provides an unambiguous depiction of events by live customers displaying the full spectrum of emotions, enabling businesses to bring about positive, targeted change quickly and more effectively.

One of the preexisting InMoment applications incorporated within Resolve utilises IBM's Watson? intelligent workflow technology, which actually encourages the user to extrapolate their experience, giving the platform much richer data from which to surface additional insights. e.g. Customer selects the "Tell your story" Written dialogue box from the digital omnichannel, in order to provide feedback; once the user starts to type, the Watson AI generates follow up questions for them to answer based upon what they have already written —User: "It was a great experience" Watson: "Which experience was great? and, what was great about this particular experience?"

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Resolve provides up to the minute qualitative, and quantitative analysis from live structured data sources. It is also capable of surfacing valuable actionable insights from unstructured data, provided the sample used is of sufficient size and quality, all delivered by state-of-the-art dashboard telemetry using active widgets, which also provide the source data for analysis when selected. This can be invaluable to any industry as Resolve does not only surface regular insights, such as the who, what, where, and when, it also provides the most valuable of actionable insights —the WHY. e.g., Why isn't your campaign resonating? Why is your customer churn so high? Why is your revenue down by location? Why is this dealer selling more cars than the other 8,000 across all 155 countries? Which dealer is achieving the highest customer service rating, and why?

Resolve is a cloud-native, multi-tenant solution, able to incorporate the customer's 'nested' parent child relationships by geo within their particular database partition or cluster, and its extensible EAI gateway can integrate with unlimited numbers and types of data source, so being able to drill down to an individual location in any country, to surface a host of actionable insights with a single click on a digital map, on PC, tablet, or phone (mobile first design) is truly liberating for any CEO wishing to improve their customer experience and increase their Net Promoter Score and bottom line.

Resolve's insights are truly actionable from anywhere —anytime.

Resolve also makes use of a preexisting Salesforce API to track the evolution of the open case at each stage of escalation. It is called "closed loop," because after the case is closed, due to a seemingly successful outcome, a Net Promoter System 'golden' question is automatically generated and sent to the customer to verify their degree of satisfaction; if the answer comes back passive, or detracting, the case is immediately reinitiated at the next stage of escalation, until there is a satisfactory resolution (or not, one cannot satisfy everyone all the time).

Resolve was acknowledged by leading industry analysts to be the first and only fully closed-loop case management solution in the world. It was also instrumental in elevating InMoment to "Leader" in the Forrester Wave? quadrant for Customer Feedback Management Platforms three years in a row.

My overarching strategy was also acclaimed by Forrester Research as "???????????? 1 (???? ?????? ??????????) ?????? ???? ???????????? ????????????????."

? 2017-2050 ???????????? ?????????????? ?????? ???????????? ????????????????