The forum will be held on the 9th February between 6:30-9:30pm at the HKPC in Kowloon Tong.

Further details can be found at the following URL:
http://www.hkcs.org.hk/edm/20120109/BIKMSIG_Seminar/

	The subtitle to this workshop was: “Whispered voices: Understanding Customers Better Than They Understand Themselves”.
A PDF of the workshop can be found HERE (file size 7.5MB)

As Henry Ford once said: “if you ask people what they want. they would say “a better horse”. Closer to home, nobody knew that they wanted an iPad until they used one – and Apple does almost no market research.

Systematic Innovation (derived from TRIZ) is a way of overcoming mental inertia for seeking new ideas that eventually become things of value. However, it still leaves the end question: who will value it? Whilst ‘one should never make predictions – particularly about the future’ something better than guessing user needs is wanted.

This is ‘TrenDNA’ which is based on a three million data-point 12 year programme of research that revealed some of the underlying DNA of innovation and change, including insights into why most change initiatives fail and what organisations need to do to make innovations succeed.

The start of an innovation processes is ‘function’: what function are we hoping to provide and who will value it? J.P. Morgan said “man buys for two reasons: the good reason (tangible) and the real reason’ – something intangible that he may not even know himself and may be more to do with status that usefulness.

So, who is the person who will most value your product or services?
This is where the principles of TrenDNA helps.

The first derives from the work of Harry Dent whose research showed the propensity to spend related to age. In the developed world, this peaks at about 48 years old.

The next two principles are about how people think and how one generation of people comes to influence the next. Since Maslow’ hierarchy of needs, Clare Graves, through a 30 years programme of research in great depth, laid the basis of ‘Spiral Dynamics’ (1998) which is all about how people think (not what they think). It suggests that there are eight ways that are named: Survival,Tribal, Feudal, Order, Scientific, Communitarian, Hierarchy and Holistic. People in one are not ‘better’ than others — just different and these differences have to be understood when determining if they will ‘buy into’ what you are offering. For example, the way of selling the idea of innovation to a highly successful ‘Order’ manager will be rather different from selling it to the Holistic one!

The second principle comes from the research of two historians William Strauss and Neil Howe (1998). They uncovered a number of patterns describing how societies seem to repeatedly pass through certain stages of hitting and overcoming the same problems. The most important of these is the way that parents raise their child will, in turn, affect the way in which these eventually raise their own children. The overall result of this is that society as a whole, at any time, has four generations with different characteristics which, in our time, are Generation Y, Silent, Baby Boomers, Generation X.

Of course, this does not mean that everyone fits precisely into any characteristic but the ‘flavour’ of an age group at any time tends that way and is meaningful to anyone trying to understand what they value.

All this now reaches the point of huge complexity so a tool is needed to manage create a map that not only simplifies it but also points to what we are seeking. This is done with a set of cards that provoke thinking and help resolve the contradictions that lead to an innovation that a group of people will value it.

TrenDNA needs the explorer to go through a number of stages of being provoked into thinking outside the box. It is not step-by step or ‘push button’ but requires commitment of some time.

Darrell Mann is an inspiring and energetic teacher and everyone enjoyed a stimulating and insightful day. We hope to get a repeat some time in the future.

Supporting organisations:

Registrations for this event have closed.  

Everyone knows that capturing the Voice of the Customer is a vital part of any  organisation, whether the enterprise be public or private, profit or non-profit, or focused on products or services. Unfortunately, what every organisation knows is that the customer is very often completely unable to tell us what they want next. They will know to ask for better and cheaper, but, to quote Henry Ford, what they are asking for is a faster horse and not a car.

So, they don’t know what to ask for beforehand, but as soon as they see it (or pretty soon after), they know that they want it. What can organisations do in this situation?

Based on a three million data-point 12 year programme of research, the workshop will reveal some of the underlying DNA of innovation and change , including insights into why most change initiatives fail and what organisations need to do to make innovations succeed.

Darrell Mann Director, Systematic Innovation
With over 800 papers and articles to his name, plus the best-selling ‘Hands-On Systematic Innovation’ and TrenDNA books, Darrell is now one of the most widely published authors on innovation in the world. Featured in ‘Who’s Who in the World’, Darrell is also recognised as one of the world’s most prolific inventors. His consulting clients include Procter & Gamble, Siemens, Petronas, RioTinto, SABIC, Eli Lilly, Nestle, Oman government and, through EU-supported research and dissemination programmes, a wide roster of SME organisations. His work involves a spectrum of applications from strategy development to IP creation to problem solving in technical, business and behavioural areas.

Programme:
Big Picture Overview – why so many attempts (97%) to understand customers go wrong and what successful companies do that the rest somehow fail to do.
Innovation = commercially successful step-change = Voice of Customer x Voice of System.

Outcome: an understanding of the DNA of innovation success and that there is a scientific way to hear the real voice of the customer

Voice Of Customer Dimension 1 – How We Think
Outcome: understanding the first critical dimension: why the way we organise information in our heads leads us into thinking that customers behave unpredictably. Includes a questionnaire for you to calibrate yourself against the various universal Thinking Styles.

Voice Of Customer Dimension 2 – Generational Cycles
Outcome: understand the second critical dimension: the high degree of predictability found in generational patterns. You learn what this means for the way we design our products and services and how to predict trends that haven’t started yet.

Voice of Customer Interactions – unravelling the complexities of societal trend patterns.
Outcome: practical tools that allow the complexity of societal trends to be mapped in a meaningful way and learning that the real trick to seeing the real voice of the customer lies between different trends rather than in them

Voice of System – Predictable Evolution Of Technical & Business Systems
Outcome: once we understand what the customer really wants, the next job is to deliver them the right solution. You will learn a pair of tools that will enable rapid convergence of successful solutions. Someone, somewhere has already solved your basic problem is the hypothesis; here we show you how to find them.

Putting It All Together
Outcome: an overall process that you can take back to your organisations. You are welcome to bring along their own future prediction problems and challenges to work on during the frequent exercises scheduled through the event.

The first meeting of 2012 will be a KMRC/HKKMS joint sponsored event on the 17th January 2012.

The speaker is Annalie Killian, from Australian Mutual Provident (AMP)  who has the wonderful job title ” Catalyst for Magic”  Annalie is an award winning thought leader in driving enterprise collaboration and innovation.  This is a must attend event.

Join us on the 17th January at 7:00pm in Room BC305, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Quick synopsis of the talk
Whilst many other corporate programmes have faltered, the AMP innovation culture has steadily grown, and today enjoys a key strategic focus at the Leadership level.  Annalie will talk about how collaboration and innovation have joined hands to shift the culture of AMP, outline the eco-system approach she espouses, and explain the key role that the AMPLIFY Festival of Innovation and Thought Leadership, an event she created and produce every 2 years, as a catalyst and accelerator of change.”

Who is Annalie?
Annalie’s role focuses on cultivating a culture of innovation and collaboration, helping people across all levels explore new trends, experiment with ideas and emerging technologies, and find ways to apply or commercialise them. She founded AMP’s crowdsourcing innovation programme which has grown from a grassroots movement in 2003 to a company‐wide programme by 2009.

Fuller details of Annalie and this event can be found HERE

Please complete the form below to register for this event

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We then had a fascinating presentation from Prof Eric Tsui, from the KMRC and Hong Kong PolyU, who presented his insights and research on the use of social media to enhance collaboration, marketing and learning.

The next HK KMS event will be in mid January, more news coming soon.

A few photos from the event follow:

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

The speaker for the event will be Professor Eric Tsui who will update us on the topic of Social Media. A synopsis of the talk as well as a bio of Prof Tsui can be found below.

The event is free for HKKMS members, $100 for KMRC members, and $200 for non-members.  More information of the Foreign Correspondent’s Club, including a map of the location,  can be found at http://www.fcchk.org/

We look forward to seeing you at the meeting.

Use of Social Media to enhance collaboration, marketing and learning

Rising popularity of social software (aka Web 2.0) has lead to an exponential growth of user-generated content (UGC).  Prima facie, such a dramatic increase in the amount of information will lead to further information overload and complicate the task of obtaining useful insight and knowledge . Nevertheless, a positive result can be obtained if available tools and content are leveraged appropriately and especially among trusted networks. This talk will outline new developments in the field and showcase the results of several prototypes.

Professor Eric Tsui’s Bio:

Eric Tsui joined Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) in 1989 after years of academic research in automated knowledge acquisition, natural language processing, case-based reasoning and knowledge engineering tools. Between August 2000 and January 2005, he assumed the roles of Chief Research Officer, Asia Pacific for CSC as well as Innovation Manager at Australian Mutual Provident (AMP) and Maybank, two strategic outsourcing accounts at CSC in Asia Pacific region. Appointed as the Professor of Knowledge Management at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University under the President’s Distinguished Professionals Scheme in September 2002, he joined the university as a full time staff in March 2005. In the past 6 years, he has designed and delivered numerous public and custom-designed knowledge management and technologies workshops. He has also consulted for many government departments and private organizations in Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, and Brunei. Eric is Vice President of the Hong Kong Knowledge Management Society, an honorary advisor on KM to the Hong Kong Police College, and a member on IT Technical Advisory Sub-Committee in the Hospital Authority.

At the November meeting, Eric Spain, the Director of Innovation Insight, Hong Kong, followed up September’s ‘Looking behind the curtain: The impact of ignorance in German hospitals’ with the way valuable knowledge can be created ‘between the ears’ using a systematic processes.  He started with his own innovation: a map, for everyone present, of the story that he was to tell about the why, when, where, who and how of ‘The Issue’.

Eric then asked a simple but rather pertinent question: what is innovation?

His answer was: ‘Innovation is any change that produces something new of value’. Simple enough, perhaps, but something to think about. The important words here are ‘any’, ‘change’ and the idea of producing something ‘of value’. We are not here looking for change just for ‘the sake of change’: it must be something that is perceived as being ‘of value’. If it does not produce value, it is not an innovation!

• Over 80 per cent of attempted innovations fail
• Over 90 per cent that do reach the market will fail
• Over 98 per cent of university-initiated technology innovations fail.
• Over 90 per cent of innovations are delivered late, over-budget or to a lower quality than was originally planned
• Over 90 per cent of collaborative innovations fail

This can only be improved by a systematic approach, he said.   He is himself an expert in such a system developed many years ago by a Russian engineer, Genrich Altshuller (1926 – 1998).  By any reckoning, Altshuller was a fascinating man and his story certainly enthralled those present. He was originally an engineer who worked in the ‘Inventions Inspection’ department of Caspian Sea Flotilla of the Soviet Navy. He was in charge of looking after ‘inventiveness’ and had to document what people were doing for the patent office. His years of study lead him to create a system to explain how inventiveness works.

The subject interests all, but it obviously needs a great deal more study. The idea that it could be tied to a proven methodology was intriguing. It is certain that this will not be the end of any talk about Systematic Innovation.  It is likely to occupy many minds for a while to come.

A basic view of TRIZ can be read on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ

Innovation Insight
www.innovasight.com

Darrell Mann Systematic Innovation.(books and software)
http://www.systematic-innovation.com/

The Altshuller Institute  (books):
http://www.aitriz.org/

Further details on the talk and the speaker can be found below.

The meeting will be held at our usual venue on Thursday 3 Nov Conference Room 2, 22/F, United Centre 95 Queensway (Admiralty MTR Station).

The event is free for members of the HKKMS and HK$200 for non-members.

My colleagues and I look forward to seeing you at the meeting.

Innovation: creating valuable knowledge out of ignorance

An innovation is any new deliverable that produces value. It goes way beyond just generating ideas and applies to everything – not just Technology, the first and last thing that people in Hong Kong think about when they hear that word.

Despite Innovation being high on today’s management agenda , organisations are not very good at it.  Over 80% of attempted innovations fail before they reach the market and over 90% of those that do also fail. Also, many firms in established industries are in denial when others innovate – they don’t see a sea-change coming – examples include the way recorded music is distributed, the demise of gas mantles 100 years ago, or the impact of airlines on American railways.

Why?

Whilst enterprises have the organisation and the people to successfully produce their products or services, other enablers are needed for innovation: it is no longer an ‘add-on’ nor an ‘optional extra’.

Eric will go over this ground and tell the extraordinary story of a Russian genius who ‘discovered’ TRIZ (The Theory of Inventive Problem Solving). This was then developed in the West and extended into other fields such as management. Now referred to as “Systematic Innovation”,  it has been adopted by rising global giants , notably Samsung and LG in Asia.  Eric will then give an outline of the ‘toolkit’ and structured data bases that now exist with examples of how they work.

We will discuss the relevance of the Systematic Innovation to firms in Hong Kong.

Eric Spain’s Bio:
Eric Spain is a science graduate who pursued a career in broadcasting and telecommunications engineering in the UK, Ireland, Uganda, Singapore and Hong Kong. He joined the Hong Kong Government in 1973, held posts in a number of departments and served on a number of Government and University advisory bodies. He is a Fellow of the HKIE and of the IET and was an early strong ‘activist’ for putting Information Technology onto a professional footing. He has a long-standing interest in the processes of getting new thinking such as Design Method, Systematic Innovation, Open Space Technology and, of course, Education.

Max at the 2010 HK KMS conference

As many of you know, Max presented on two occasions to the HKKMS, the first of which was to a small group of corporate members at the FCC in December of 2009. Many of you though will remember him as the keynote presenter at our Conference in March 2010. We have a recording of that talk and will look to make it available on this site in the near future.

Max was a truly brilliant man. He studied architecture at Cambridge in the 1960′s, and this discipline provided the framework for a deep understanding of the many areas of knowledge that he acquired during his career. I first met him at a coffee shop in London in the summer of 2009, and this modest, self effacing and gentle man proved to be outstanding company, with his understated humour and superb conversation.

Professor Boisot held the Chair in Strategic Management at the Birmingham Business School (BBS), the University of Birmingham. He was an also Associate Fellow at the Said Business School, University of Oxford, and was a visiting fellow at the Sol Snider Entrepreneurial Center of the Wharton School, the University of Pennsylvania. He held an MSc in Management from M.I.T. as well as a PhD in technology transfer from Imperial College, London University. He was working on with CERN, the high-energy physics laboratory in Geneva.

From 1984 to 1989 Max Boisot was dean and director of the China-EC Management Program, the first MBA program to be run in the People’s Republic of China in Beijing. Max Boisot designed and negotiated the program, which subsequently evolved to become the China-Europe International Business School (CEIBS) in Shanghai, currently one of Asia’s top business schools.

His book, Knowledge Assets: Securing Competitive Advantage in the Information Economy (Oxford University Press, 1998) was awarded the Ansoff Prize for the best book on strategy in 2000.

He is a great loss to the fields of Strategy and Knowledge Management.

We welcome Professor Dr. Wilkesmann to the September meeting of the Society.
While the focus of KM has mainly been about the capturing and sharing of knowledge, how can we draw benefits from studying the unknown , sometimes referred to as  Ignorance Management. The session will have relevance to not
only those in the medical profession , but also those taking important decisions when they lack all the information they need.

The meeting will be held at our usual venue Conference Room 1, 22/F, United Centre 95 Queensway (Admiralty MTR Station)

The event is free for members of the HKKMS and HK$200 for non-members

To register for the event, please complete the following form:

Synopsis

In their daily work, physicians have to deal with incomplete decision-making. Mostly, they have no time or no resources to gather all relevant information before they make a diagnosis or administer a therapy. Inconsistent decisions made can lead to further suffering. In the worst case ignorance can cause death. From the management’s point of view, inconsistent decisions can lead to cost escalation, lengthier treatment periods, or legal actions.

Using the case of German physicians, Prof. Wilkesmann will present four different dimensions of ignorance and give some practical insights on how individual, organizational and cross-organizational aspects influence dealing with ignorance. The research, which is funded by the German Research Foundation, is based on 42 interviews with physicians who work in different medical fields (pathology, internal medicine, surgery and anesthesiology) and at different hierarchical levels (medical director, head of department, senior physicians, assistant physicians) in Germany.

The aim of the presentation is to investigate the “dark side of knowledge”, i.e. how physicians – who already possess comprehensive knowledge – deal with things they do not know. Ignorance is an important thing to explore because especially in the case of physicians ignorance hurts.

About Prof. Dr. Wilkesmann

Maximiliane (Maxie) Wilkesmann is assistant professor at the Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Science at the TU University of Dortmund in Germany. She received her PhD in 2009 at the Ruhr-University of Bochum for which she has been awarded a scholarship from the Hans-Boeckler Foundation.She is visiting lecturer at the Knowledge Management Research Centre at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her research interests include knowledge management, knowledge transfer, organization studies, teaching and learning with new media, management of competencies, and handling ignorance in organizations

Prof. Dr. Maximiliane Wilkesmann
TU University of Dortmund
Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Science
Otto-Hahn-Str. 4
44227 Dortmunde-

mail: maximiliane.wilkesmann@tu-dortmund.de

www: http://www.wiso.tu-dortmund.de/wiso/s/en/chair