December 3rd, 2006
Nokia World day two - Geoffrey Moore
I'm writing this on the last leg of my journey home from Amsterdam and the Nokia World conference. Having narrowly averted the attempt of the self-professed road warrior sitting in front of me who apparently hasn't yet logged enough miles to figure out the courtesy of not slamming the seat back into the person behind him, I thought I'd recount the highlights from the second day of the event.
As was the case with the first day, the middle of the day was broken up into three concurrent "streams" and there was a steady schedule of press briefings held in parallel to the sessions. The concurrent tracks were bracketed in the morning and afternoon by keynotes. The highlight of day two was a session featuring Geoffrey Moore, author of the seminal guide to technology marketing, Crossing the Chasm.
All of the keynotes from the even have been posted on the Nokia World site along with photos on Flickr and video on YouTube. Moore's presentation is well worth looking into if you're involved in a market in which every innovation you introduce is rapidly matched by competitors.
If you're familiar with Geoffrey Moore's latest book, Dealing with Darwin, his presentation didn't add much in the way of new thinking but he is a great speaker, totally at ease with his material, and there's always value in hearing the thinker explain his thoughts. But the presentation felt a bit rushed - like much of his earlier work, Moore uses an escalating set of models that illustrate the thinking and implementation of his concepts and it takes some time to establish the requisite vocabulary to grasp the model. This felt like a 90-minute talk delivered in about 50 minutes.
To provide some perspective on his talk, here is the description of Dealing with Darwin from the book site:
Every five years or so, it seems, the balance of power in business shifts, and a new set of frameworks is needed to bring the new realities into focus. In the early 1990s, as the technology sector rose to power, the new reality was technology-enabled markets and the new frameworks included the Technology Adoption Life Cycle. In the late 1990s, it was all about the rise of the Internet, the dot.coms, and dizzying stock market valuations, and managing for shareholder value became core. With the downturn in the early 2000s, management retrenched to dig itself out of a huge economic hole, and books on execution became required reading.
Now as we enter the latter half of the decade, yet another set of new issues confront us. The great growth market opportunities have been transplanted to Asia and with them local economic advantage as well. Moreover, offers incubated in low-cost economies can be expected to disrupt business models in established markets. How can today’s leading enterprises compete successfully for revenues and profits in a globalized, commoditized, deregulated marketplace?
Moore has made the entire presentation deck available on the Dealing with Darwin site and it's a well-constructed introduction to the ideas and mechanics he presents in that book. He encourages its use as a way of introducing his latest ideas to your organization about how to create an innovation "machine" in your organization.
Marc Orchant has been building, testing, and sometimes breaking hardware and software for 25 years. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
