Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Business Aviation, Twittering the Recovery

The cover of the June 15th edition of Time magazine is a picture of an iPhone, or a similar device, with a Tweet about the cover story on Twitter, the innovative fast growing social network. What could this possibly have to do with the recovery and growth of Business Aviation? Read on.

In my last article for Hangar Talk I wrote about Glenn Hutchins, founder of Silver Lake, and his prediction that innovation would lead us out of this recession. This week in the cover story for Time Magazine, author Steven Johnson writes about the amazing growth of Twitter, the social networking site that has grown using "end-user innovation," a concept that Johnson explains as, "where consumers actively modify a product to adapt it to their needs.”

Twitter was introduced to the Internet and the social networking community in 2006 and like blogging was picked up first by teenagers as a way to stay connected. They have a compelling need to know what their circles of friends are doing. In fact when you go to Twitter the first thing you see is a text box asking the question, “What are you doing?”

When I first saw this my questions were, “Who cares, and why do I want to know?” But alas I am not a teen or even a 20 something, but believe me, they want to know. Not what I am doing, but what their circles of friends are doing. Then came The Campaign. Hundreds and maybe thousands of young campaign workers wanted to stay connected. With Twitter they could do so, and view the Tweets, which are limited to 140 characters, on cell phones and BlackBerries as text messages (SMS), and on computers. I have a feeling that the need for Twitter feedback, and not just email, might have been behind President Obama’s fight to keep his BlackBerry.

Johnson tells of attending a small private conference on the future of education attended by 40 educators, entrepreneurs, scholars, philanthropists and venture capitalists. At the beginning the organizers announced that anyone could record their comments and questions on Twitter. During the conference comments were being displayed on a screen. Before the end Tweets were pouring in from far beyond the confines of the room where the attendees were sitting.

This week I am attending the Air Charter Summit where over 100 business jet operators will be assembling at a hotel and discussing how to address and solve some of the very significant challenges facing the business jet industry. Will this group be Twittering their thoughts in real time along with many others not at the meeting? Maybe not, but think about how more productive the meeting might be with thoughts, not just from the 100 physically present, but from many others not able to attend in person.

(Full disclosure, Steven Johnson, the author of five best selling books, contributor to The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Guardian, Wired Magazine, and a futurist much in demand on the lecture circuit, is my nephew.)

Saturday, June 6, 2009

Will Innovation Lead the Way?

Glenn Hutchins one of the founders of the highly successful private equity firm Silver Lake, after studying and outlining how we got into this mess, sees the way out - Innovation.

Hutchins says, "While at times rushed and incoherent, the public policy response to the crisis has been breathtaking in its scale. The approximately $10 trillion in resources shoveled at the problem dwarfs any prior undertaking in our history including World War II - which is estimated to have cost $5 trillion in today's dollars. This is the all-important difference between today and the '30s. In contrast to the passive and counterproductive actions taken then by the Hoover administration and the world's central bankers, today's leaders - having learned the lessons of the Depression and quickly grasping the ramifications of the Lehman failure - resolved to err on the side of doing too much rather than too little."

Hutchins is may be right about innovation but consider that ninety percent of new products fail. Venture Capitalists have shoveled billions at innovation for years yet only one in ten shows any return and most are returns are modest. The aviation is landscape is littered with the wrecks of the dreams of dreamers. The Eclipse Jet is only the most recent disaster.

Tony Ulwick developed a concept he calls Outcome-Driven Innovation® (ODI) and founded Strategyn, Inc., a global innovation management firm. ODI starts not with a product but by finding the answer to the question, “what does the customer want to accomplish? Or as Harvard professor Theodore Levitt often remarked, “People don’t want drills, they want holes.” DARPA didn’t want the Internet; they wanted a way to communicate.

I am concerned that throwing $10 trillion at our current problem might result in getting a lot of “drills” that don’t work very well. It may be too late to apply ODI concepts to what we need. But perhaps in a small way we can fund innovation in a different way. Ulwick and Jay Haynes have formed a new venture capital firm, Strategyn Ventures, to fund ODI proven products and services. If they can change the odds from 1:10 to something much less, perhaps innovation will lead the way out.