Innovation in the offering of IT services

I had dinner yesterday with Alvaro Prieto, a friend from Auxis. He is currently working on reshaping their marketing strategy as it relates to their IT services & infrastructure outsourcing offering. He is trying to depart from the traditional approach of talking hardware and IT, and find an innovative way of positioning their services as what they really are: an administrative relief, reduced liabilities and improved (measurable) productivity to allow their clients to focus and excel on their core competencies.

Do you know an example of a company that was successful in changing the language and mental associations to their type of service that were standard in their industry?

Philosophy and innovation

This post was sent by Gonzalo Gutierrez:

In philosophy there is much written on the subject of innovation as a mechanism that we as human beings need to attenuate the existential anguish. Apparently there is something in life (death, reasoning that looks for and does not find…) that we cannot handle that generates anguish, whether conscious or unconsciously. For that reason, it is a necessity for us to use our creative capability. I transcribe a phrase of Friedrich Nietzsche (from the book ” Thus Spoke Zarathustra “): “To create it is the true emancipation of the pain and relief in life. But for the creator to be born, he must endure many pains and much metamorphosis.” Apparently the possibility of creating (“to break the old rules”) is a way of living. But obviously it is not a linear or spontaneous way.

Gurú Javharaji on innovation

This post was sent by my friend and associate Javier Whittingslow. Here it is, enjoy:

The mind has limited storage space, so in order to simplify, many of us give only one attribute to things and persons
For example, the grass is green, soft drinks are carbonated, Barbara is smart, Luis is a tiger; Javier is … who knows!!
But lately we have over simplified and we have extended that simplification to the skills of our co-workers and friends. When someone is introduced as a person, the first thing we ask is “What do you do for a living?” If the person answers “I’m an accountant, or engineer or meteorologist (I’m stuck at the Quito airport because of bad weather at this moment), we will not have a problem, our brain will stick a label or “post it” to that face and case closed. For example, Luis = Boss; Barbara = Finance; Javier = Argentino
The issue arises when the person on top of being an engineer has other abilities. If we introduce ourselves as an accountant, a runner and a pianist, like myself, we will encounter in our interviewer a different attitude and a strange face. The other person will not understand the wide variety of skills and will have doubts about my competencies (as many of you are doing at this exact moment) with the numbers, the sports and the music. Something positive will turn negative, the person will look at me and “label” me “UNCAPABLE in every aspect”.

There is a theory called “competitive advantage” a theory developed by the English economist David Ricardo (Homaro, maybe he was Brazilian as he has two names!!). This man stated that if a country was more efficient than another one at manufacturing a product, it would need to devote all of the resources behind that product and leave to other countries the production of those products where they were less efficient. Don’t you think that in Latin America we have several examples? It’s not a coincidence: (Argentina = Grains, Venezuela = Oil, Peru Mining, Bolivia = LPG)
If we look at us, this is comparable with the term “Specialization”. Today being an accountant or a sales guy or an engineer is not enough. Many “specializations” have arisen even in simple professions. We have accountant specialists for everything, for example in “corporate taxes” (can you believe that!!) and sales persons specialized in cola soft drinks in the modern channel of Cochabamba. So, how are we going to accept that a guy like Javier who started as a controller today wants to become the “Official Planner of Nola”? As you can see, today even in finance we have several specializations: control, planning, IT, and it’s difficult to change the label of a person even within the same finance background.
If we focus only on our job, we will certainly become experts, but we will end up building a barrier that will not allow us to expand our knowledge about the beverage business. If we do not go beyond the basics of our business, we are not going to be able to redefine the limits that us and the company have today, and as a result, we are not going to be able to innovate.
Only those who take the time to learn and spend a couple of hours per day outside their core accountabilities will be able to re-invent the business processes that we use today. We need time to develop skills in other disciplines and we need to have an open mind to learn new things. We have to find and create those special moments for our personal development.
Placing labels on things, persons or professionals are the main barriers to INNOVATION in our society and in companies today. During “The Renaissance” (Re-birth), the Medici family provided the right environment in Florence, where sculputures, painters, scientists, poets, philosophers, bankers, architects and writers gathered together exchanging insights from one discipline to the other. They learned from each other breaking barriers between their own professions. The Renaissance was an age in which artistic, social, scientific, and political thought turned into new directions. The creative explosion that Florence lived in the late 13th century was called “The Medici Effect”. That same environment is the one that I see today in Nola. Marketing, sales, finance, administrators, nutritionists and engineers working together with the common objective of transforming our organization, re-thinking the way we do business today and putting forth innovation as the main axis of our TRANSFORMATION
When we openly and candidly express ourselves in business conversations, we enrich the persons that surround us in the same way that we enrich ourselves. Without noticing, we are coaching each other, building a virtuous circle that is making us grow both, as individuals and as a group. At the same time, we learn that we are preparing ourselves for future jobs of higher responsibility.
We have to continue excelling everyday in what we do, but we have to go beyond that. Participating in projects is the right way to learn more about our current business and processes. We have to start today and get involved in our “personal transformation”, understanding the impact that each of us has in the value chain, offering our help to local teams.
Promoting the intersection of the different disciplines and cultures is the first step to starting the generation of new ideas. We are most definitely on the right path and in the near future you will be hearing of Harvard students reviewing “The Nola Effect” case study.

Guru Javharaji WhitiChokpaslow, Master in hidden and untapped new sciences.

Hillary Clinton (Sopranos)

I found this an innovative use of youtube and it’s viral power in politics.

Innovacion abierta (Open Innovation)

Este termino se refiere a la innovacion que se genera y evoluciona a traves del aporte externo. En estos tiempos, muchos expertos aseguran que el modelo tradicional de innovacion, enfocado hacia adentro y cerrado a las ideas y tecnologias que vengan de “afuera”, esta convirtiendose en obsoleto.

El nuevo paradigma es el de la innovacion abierta, que incentiva y proactivamente solicita aportes del mundo exterior. Hace unos dias, encontre este portal que justamente intenta facilitar el proceso abierto de contribuciones a una idea. El portal es llama “IdeaWicket” y esta en etapa de prueba (beta). Vale la pena revisarlo y ver la dinamica que se crea entre quienes publican sus ideas y la gente que aporta con sus comentarios.