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(via Here’s the advantage that keeps Silicon Valley ahead of the world - The Washington Post)

To understand the power of platforms, compare a shopping mall and a roadside store. (Photo: Mark Gail for The Washington Post)

By Vivek Wadhwa

 A trait shared by the fastest growing and most disruptive companies in history — Google, Amazon, Uber, AirBnb, and eBay—is that they aren’t focused on selling products, they are building platforms. The ability to leverage the network effects of a platform is something that the technology industry learned long ago — and perfected. It is what gives Silicon Valley an unfair advantage over competitors in every industry; something that is becoming increasingly important as all information becomes digitized.

A platform isn’t a new concept, it is simply a way of building something that is open, inclusive, and has a strategic focus. Think of the difference between a roadside store and a shopping center. The mall has many advantages in size and scale and every store benefits from the marketing and promotion done by others. They share infrastructure and costs. The mall owner could have tried to have it all by building one big store, but it would have missed out on the opportunities to collect rent from everyone and benefit from the diverse crowds that the tenants attract.

Apple learned this the hard way in the 1980s when it created the first versions of the Macintosh. It built its own proprietary, closed, hardware, operating system, and applications. Bill Gates, on the other hand, realized that key to power and profit was the operating system and a thriving ecosystem. He designed Microsoft Windows as an open system in which other players could provide the hardware and software. The more programs that ran on Windows, the more users wanted it, and therefore more developers created applications. Windows became a near monopoly the 90s—while Apple came close to bankruptcy.

Fortunately for Apple, by 2007, Steve Jobs had figured out Microsoft’s advantage. He built the iPhone App Store and iTunes as open platforms on which other players could provide content. The top five mobile phone carriers—Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and LG—had owned 90 percent of the industry’s profits. Yet Apple was able to leap ahead and capture literally all of this.

The power of platforms is explained in a new book, Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You, by Geoffrey Parker, Marshall Van Alstyne, and Sangeet Choudary. The authors show how platform businesses bring together producers and consumers in high-value exchanges in which the chief assets are information and interactions. These interactions are the creators of value, the sources of competitive advantage.

Apple was able to connect app developers with app users in a market in which both sides gained value and paid it a tax. As the number of developers increased so did the number of users. This created the “network effect” — a process in which the value snowballs as more production attracts more consumption and more consumption leads to more production.

Just as malls have linked consumers and merchants, newspapers have long linked subscribers and advertisers. What has changed is that technology has reduced the need to own infrastructure and assets and made it significantly cheaper to build and scale digital platforms.

Traditional businesses, called “pipelines” by Parker, Van Alstyne, and Choudary, create value by controlling a linear series of processes. The inputs at one end of the value chain, materials provided by suppliers, undergo a series of transformations to make them worth more. Apple’s handset business was a classic pipeline, but when combined with the App Store, the marketplace that connects developers with users, it became a platform. As a platform it grew exponentially because of the network effects.

The authors say that the move from pipeline to platform involves three key shifts:

1.  From resource control to orchestration. In the pipeline world, the key assets are tangible — such as mines and real estate. With platforms, the value is in the intellectual property and community. The network generates the ideas and data — the most valuable of all assets in the digital economy.

2. From internal optimization to external interaction. Pipeline businesses achieve efficiency by optimizing labor and processes. With platforms, the key is to facilitate greater interactions between producers and consumers. To improve effectiveness and efficiency, you must optimize the ecosystem itself.

3. Value the ecosystem rather than the individual. Rather than focusing on the value of a single customer as traditional businesses do, in the platform world it is all about expanding the total value of an expanding ecosystem in a circular, iterative, and feedback-driven process. This means that the metrics for measuring success must themselves change.

Companies such as Walmart, Nike, John Deere, and GE are working towards building platforms in their industries. John Deere, for example wants to be a hub for agricultural products. But not every industry is ripe for platforms because the underlying technologies and regulations may not be there yet.

In a paper in Harvard Business Review, Kellogg School of Management professor Robert Wolcott illustrates the problems that Netflix founder Reed Hastings had in 1997 in building a platform. Hastings had always wanted to provide on-demand video, but the technology infrastructure just wasn’t there when he needed it. So he started by building a DVDs-by-mail business — while he plotted a long-term strategy for today’s platform. According to Wolcott, Uber has a strategic intent of providing self-driving cars, but while the technology evolves it is managing with human drivers. It has built a platform that enables rapid evolution as technologies, consumer behaviors, and regulations change.

Building platforms requires a vision, but does not require predicting the future. What you need is to understand the opportunity to build the mall instead of the store and be flexible in how you get there.

[Entire article — click on the title link to read it at the Washington Post.]

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We’re glad that the U.S. economy has significantly improved in the past few years, and that “new Silicon Valleys” are growing all over the world — at least in terms of innovation and the development of creative economy ecosystems — and we would love to visit them all! We all learn best by exchanging ideas across cultures and industries. We fully support complete diversity in the workplace, and overcoming the inequality challenges that are still too prevalent in our world.

Now, entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, and organizational leaders from other cities and countries who are visiting the San Francisco Bay Area can have access to Silicon Valley companies to learn from their cultures, hiring, leadership and innovation methods. Come join us for a dynamic, unforgettable, and very enjoyable Innovation Tour in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, the East Bay, in the Wine Country, or on the beautiful, rural, Northern California seacoast in Mendocino County [mentioned in the post above this one].

At Creative Sage™, we design high impact, customized creativity, innovation, and leadership programs, and we are now offering related tours, events and workshops in wonderful urban and rural settings that will spark your imagination — and your team’s — to come up with brilliant ideas and plan how to implement new innovations in services, products, your organization’s business model, operations, or in any other area.

We use the latest in value-tested creativity and innovation techniques and processes; and we select world-class facilitators and partners to help your organization gain lasting value from your experience working — and playing — with us. Creativity and innovation processes could include design thinking, business model canvas, arts-based, interactive creativity activities, lateral thinking, gamification, or other proven methods.

We also work on workplace culture issues, leadership challenges, handling transitions, and building resilience in organizations and individual clients. You’ll be able to see first-hand how Silicon Valley companies create a culture of creativity and innovation, and you’ll be able to talk with their leaders. We’ll arrange a customized tour for you that addresses your organization’s issues.

We can design additional customized programs and tours for individuals, families, work teams, university students and faculty, including those in undergraduate or graduate entrepreneurship or MBA programs, and other special interest groups. Join our email list and visit our web site, or call: (510) 845-5510 for more information.

You’ll take away essential, valuable insights that you could not achieve in any other way, while enjoying the experience of a lifetime!

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mytarot3universe:

Happy spring equinox 🐣

Art by Amanda Clark. Found on Pinterest.

#springequinox #pinterest #goddess #awake

We’ll be taking a Spring break on Tumblr and most social media until approximately April 11, 2016. Thank you to our community for your patience!

photosbyjaye:

Beyond the obvious beauty and grace of our First Lady, one must consider the historic importance of this photo. Our history books sweep under the rug the fact that the White House was built by African American slaves. For the next 150 years the majority of the serving staff of the so called “people’s house” were African American. In 1901 Booker T. Washington was the first African American to be received there as a guest by Theodore Roosevelt, to the horror of Washington society. They are all at last vindicated in our first African American first family. Note…It is my humble opinion that no matter what family should occupy the White House after January 2017, and the following generations for that matter, they will never equal the style, debonair, and class as that of the Obamas.


noblesouldesign:

A renaissance in scientific illustration is afoot. David Goodsell—used watercolor and ink to create the best scientific image of the year.

http://www.fastcodesign.com/3057926/the-best-scientific-image-of-the-year-was-a-hand-painted-watercolor

http://www.wellcomeimageawards.org/about/about-the-awards/

(via scientificillustration)

nevver:

Venn Diagram

We hope that you and your family enjoy a much luckier, happier St. Patrick’s Day!!!

(via nevver)

(via How Obamacare Is Changing the Startup World - Fortune)

By Ezekiel J. Emanuel

Healthcare delivery is entering a new era.

As Americans begin to decide how to vote in 2016, one of the many questions they are asking is: how well is the Affordable Care Act working?

The natural inclination is to look backwards—to judge whether the ACA has measurably improved the health care system in the last 6 years. Here, the answer is clearly yes. Nearly 19 million people have gotten insured. And health care inflation has been lower than at any time in the last 50 years, although drug costs are going up faster. Not bad.

A better way to evaluate the ACA is to look forward—to assess whether the law is setting the framework for a higher quality and lower-cost system. The best window on the future is the health care start-up sector. These are the companies that will shape the care we all receive in the next decades. And the picture provides good reasons to be optimistic.

Overall, 2015 was a record year for medical investing, including in biotech companies making new drugs. But it was also a record year for investing in start-ups aimed at improving quality or reducing costs. In 2011, just after passage of the ACA, about $1.1 billion was invested in “technology-centric, health-related companies that facilitate healthcare administration, delivery, or access.” In 2014 and 2015, that figured skyrocketed to over $4.3 billion.

Where is all this money going?

A lot of it is going where you might expect: new apps and technological innovations to deliver care more efficiently. There are many companies, for example, devoted to scaling up telemedicine so that patients can see their doctor without going into the office. Others are working to improve medication compliance with new gadgets like “smart” pill-bottle caps. Still others, like Omada Health, are using gamification and virtual communities to promote diet, exercise and health living among the chronically ill.

But, perhaps surprisingly, many of these start-ups are working to redesign and reimagine parts of the health care system that already exist but aren’t working well or have been long ignored. Many Americans are already familiar with Oscar, the irreverent, insurance start up targeting hipsters in New York and now Los Angeles and Texas. But in Colorado, there is also Bright Health Plan, a start-up picking up the pieces of the state’s co-op to launch a low-cost, narrow network health plan.

Similarly, several companies have dedicated themselves to modernizing primary care practices by using big data. VillageMD is currently operating in Houston, Indiana and New Hampshire, soon to be in Ohio and Illinois. They provide physicians with data on their patient panels and builds support teams that include pharmacists, nurse managers, and care coordinators, all focused on coordinating care and improving patient results. A team of clinicians make home visits on high-risk patients. While pharmacists do home delivery of chronic medications with medication reconciliation at time of delivery. The physicians have data not only on their own performance but also on the specialists and hospitals they use, helping them identify the highest quality and lowest cost specialists to use. Village MD has been able to raise primary care physician salaries, which helps attract more into the area. Another example is Aledade, which has organized over 500 primary care physicians in 11 states with 80,000 patients. The company claims lots of improvement in vaccination rates, preventive services, 24/7 access that have reduced emergency room use to 6% and hospitalization rates to 4%.

There are a string of new companies working to improve another problem area: mental and behavioral health. Lantern provides patients with customized assessments in laymen’s terms and offers tailored online programs such as cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Ginger.io links people to a coach and if necessary a licensed therapist. Quartet is trying to bridge the gap between mental health care and primary care. For patients, it utilizes a set of online assessment and diagnostic tools to determine appropriate referrals and deploys online counseling which is has proven more beneficial than many anticipated. For therapists, Quartet provides treatment guidelines matched to proven therapeutic interventions, and uses phone-based reminders and other techniques to reduce the extremely high rate of no-show patients that exacerbate a universal problem of scarce therapist appointments.

Still, others are rethinking traditional care using the Uber model. One company, Dispatch, is developing technology that allows patients to call for emergency room-level care in their homes so that they avoid expensive trips to the hospital. Another company, Aspire, with the guidance of former Senator and physician Bill Frist, is trying to identify terminally ill patients and connect them to a nurse practitioner trained in palliative care.

The goal is to treat their symptoms and provide counseling in order to keep patients symptom free, out of the hospital, and at home with their families. Preliminary evidence suggests they cut hospital admissions by as much as 50%.

The ACA is also unleashing a flood of talented entrepreneurs into health care. As venture capitalists endlessly repeat, when it comes to new companies, “people are everything.” Entrepreneurs who used to go to traditional Silicon Valley start-ups focused on search, shopping, sharing, and software are now migrating to health care. David Ebserstadt, the former chief financial officer of Facebook, has a new health care start up. Jini Kim, who was an early Google employee, created Nuna health and along the way, she was one of the six Silicon Valley techies who saved healthcare.gov in November and December 2013. Nat Turner and Zach Weinberg created an advertising start up for You Tube in their University of Pennsylvania dorm room and sold it to Google GOOGL 0.72% . In 2012, they created Flatiron, a company that provides a user-friendly electronic medical record specifically for oncology. The company also mines the data to help drug companies streamline identification of patients for clinical trials. Lots of other senior executives with no or limited health care experience from Yammer, Reputation.com, Yahoo YHOO -0.68% , IDEO, and other companies have come into health care.

Undoubtedly, there will be booms and busts. Many of these start-ups will fail. Few will become $1 billion unicorns. But the amount of creative energy entering the health care space is a good sign that the ACA created predictability that is necessary for investors, and incentivized innovation to reduce costs and increase quality. Like all the activity that brought us Google, Facebook FB 0.43% , Amazon AMZN 0.66% , and the others, this activity offers a good reason to be optimistic about the future of health care in the USA.

Ezekiel J. Emanuel is an oncologist and Chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the Perelman School of Medicine at University of Pennsylvania. He served in the White House, helping craft the Affordable Care Act. Emanuel is also a part- time venture partner with Oak HCFT that has investments in several companies referenced in this article, including Village MD, Aspire and Quartet.

[Entire post — click on the title link to read it at Fortune.]

(via Here’s Proof the U.S. Is on the Verge of Huge Innovations - Fortune)

By Robert Litan

The critics are wrong.

So much of what the presidential candidates and the American people want to accomplish over the next four years and beyond depends on the U.S. economy growing faster, and more inclusively, than it has in recent years. This year’s hot economics book, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, by one of America’s most distinguished macroeconomists, Robert Gordon, casts a pall on whether this is possible, arguing that the U.S. had a golden century of increasing innovation from roughly 1870 to 1970, but this was unique. Since then, the rate of innovation, as measured by the annual growth in productivity (adjusted for additional labor and capital), has slowed markedly, and in Gordon’s view will continue at a slow pace for the foreseeable future, whether or not the ostensibly growth-boosting policy recommendations Gordon advances at the end of the book are implemented.

Gordon’s book was reviewed on by Fortune’s Chris Matthews, so I won’t repeat the main arguments here. Instead, I will provide a cautiously more optimistic view, but coupled with a plea for policy makers to ease the pain of more rapid productivity growth, if it materializes.

One reason for productivity optimism is outlined in a new e-book I have co-authored with former Clinton economic official Bo Cutter and Kauffman Foundation Vice President Dane Stangler, The Good Economy. In it, we share the view of some technology optimists (not all of them living in Silicon Valley) that the U.S. economy is currently experiencing another technological revolution, rivaling the industrial revolutions of the 19th century, and one that ultimately could boost annual long-term growth to as much as 3%, well above recent annual growth rates.

The core of our claim is that the convergence of enormous and continuous advances in computing power, the Internet of Things, broadband speeds, cloud computing, mobile applications, artificial intelligence, robotics and nanotechnology inevitably will unleash a broad range of new, disruptive products and services that none of us can foresee now. This will inevitably lead to faster growth in the future. The transition to more rapid growth will take time, to be sure, but this will not be unusual: electricity took several decades to fundamentally transform the economy and our society.

With a few exceptions, I wouldn’t look to large, established companies, however, to lead any innovation resurgence. That is because large companies specialize in incremental rather than disruptive innovation. The exceptions – Alphabet with its moonshot projects, Toyota and Honda with their hybrid cars, and long ago, AT&T with fiber optic cable and the transistor – are just that, exceptions.

Truly disruptive innovations that can enhance overall productivity in a big way are likely to come from startups (think of the telegraph, the telephone, the automobile, airplanes, computers, much software, Internet search, and air conditioning, all commercialized by startups). It may not be necessary to reverse the 30-year decline in the overall startup rate (the ratio of young companies with at least one employee to all firms) to usher in a more rapid wave of change, although having more startups, or “shots on goal,” would certainly help. The key is the formation and growth of new high-growth companies.

Some of these may come from solo entrepreneurs, such as Tesla CEO Elon Musk or Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, or entrepreneurial teams, like Sergei Brin and Larry Page. Others may emerge from the growing numbers of “business accelerators,” in which like talent show competitions “American Idol” or “The Voice” the sponsors pick the most promising founders or founding teams, give them mentors, coaches and exposure to their peers, and provide them with some amount of startup funding. Evidence suggests that the really good accelerators — like Y Combinator in Silicon Valley or Tech Stars in multiple locations — enable startup participants to find more early stage financing and to grow.

Another promising development is the recent emergence of “tech studios” – Betaworks in New York, Pioneer Square Labs in Seattle, and FoundryDc in the nation’s capital. In this model, one or more successful entrepreneurs with deep knowledge in one or several industry “verticals” recruits scientists, technologists or other industry specialists, puts them together in a congenial, but typically intense atmosphere (not unlike some accelerators, but for longer, sustained periods) and pays them a salary, much as they would receive if they had gone to work for Bell Labs or any current in-house corporate R&D facility, and possibly some upside incentives (equity or options) in the companies that may be formed around their ideas.

Whether through solo entrepreneurs, entrepreneurial teams, companies boosted by accelerators, or firms generated by high tech studies, the convergence of multiple parallel technologies is likely to lead to more rapid innovation than the pessimists predict. That’s the good news. The potentially bad news is that faster innovation means more technology-induced labor market churn, and thus more displacement of the kind that has led to so much worker anxiety much in evidence during the Presidential campaign so far. If the nation adopts the kind of populist remedies being mentioned by some of the candidates – such as a return to trade protectionism in this country, or a halt to further trade liberalization which could lead to a slow backsliding toward more protection by all countries – then the pace innovation almost certainly would be lower than the optimistic trajectory outlined here, and correspondingly there may be less innovation-induced worker displacement.

But given the positive long-run impacts of more rapid innovation on standards of living, moving backward should not be welcomed. The far better approach is to strengthen the social safety net to better protect workers from the economic losses they suffer on account of both technological progress and open trade. One clear solution is a system of wage insurance, which has features attractive to both political parties, and was endorsed by President Obama in his State of the Union address this year.

There is too much gloom and doom being bandied about, by candidates and the innovation pessimists. The better response is to prepare to be surprised on innovation upside, and to address the very real concerns about those who may be displaced in the process.

Robert Litan has directed economic research at the Brookings Institution, the Kauffman Foundation and Bloomberg Government. His latest book is The Good Economy.

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We are proud and honored to have had our @CreativeSage company Twitter account chosen for the fourth year in a row now (2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015), for the Top 50 Innovation Twitter Sharers List! We want to thank Innovation Excellence and everyone in our community who voted for our account again this year.

Additionally, Founder/CEO/Chief Imagination Officer Cathryn Hrudicka maintains a multidisciplinary artist account at @CathrynHrudicka that some of you may want to follow, too.

At Creative Sage™, we love to work with clients on social innovation, educational innovation, healthcare innovation, civic and government innovation projects, as well as corporate innovation projects. Our core capabilities include creativity training and coaching, and the design and facilitation of innovation programs, including in the areas of design thinking, arts-based processes, applications of science and neuroscience tools when appropriate, change management, and business model innovation.

We have been very effective in helping organizational leaders and employees move through transitions and cultural changes. We work with for-profit, nonprofit, B-corps, trade associations, and other types of organizations.

In addition to offering our services in creativity and innovation program design, consulting, leadership coaching, and training, we may be able to help your organization choose a Chief Innovation Officer — or our founder, Cathryn Hrudicka, may be able to serve in that role for your organization, on a contract, part-time or limited full-time basis.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you would like to discuss your situation and how we can help your organization move forward to a more innovative and profitable future. You can also call us at 1-510-845-5510 in San Francisco / Silicon Valley. We look forward to helping you find the path to luminous creativity and continuous innovation!

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(via How to Make the SDGs Truly Sustainable: Social Entrepreneurs as Critical Achievement Engines | Sustainable Brands)

By David Wilcox 

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), deadlined for completion in 2015, have given way to the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), launched in September at the UN General Assembly and an array of other events including the SDG Business Forum, the Social Good Summit and the Clinton Global Initiative.

In evaluating the over 100 presentations at these events, I was struck by the following:

• Few presentations gave any indication of serious learning from the wins — and losses — during 20 years of MDG work. A delineation of the models that work (i.e. more sustainable and scalable) is missing.

• In the absence of learning frameworks, presenters reiterate the same problems, now expanded to 17 goals and 169 targets. The result is a plea for more resources to support the new SDGs without any evidence that those resources will be employed more effectively.

The core request at these events was for more than four trillion dollars per year to implement the SDGs over 15 years. This leads to two questions:

1. How can you call the goals replacing the MDGs sustainable if they lead with requests for resources that are not?

2. At the beginning of the SDG process, what should the world’s government, corporate and NGO leaders focus on now to make the new global goals actually sustainable?

These questions are at the heart of ReachScale’s global search to find the most innovative and sustainable models for solving intractable challenges. We have advocated tirelessly for the need to identity models that 1) can be scaled and 2) are not reliant on non-profit funding (which is donation-dependent and driven by the dictates of donors.)

The best models we have found have social entrepreneurs at the helm who see the world differently. They frequently take the “against” position (as described in a ReachScale article, “Social Entrepreneurship & Social Innovation: Not the Same Thing”:

In branding, claiming the against position means using a competitor’s dominant spend and mindshare to carve out an anti-space — the Un-Cola for example.

Social entrepreneurs are quintessential against positioners. [Microfinance inventor] Mohammed Yunus stated it clearly: “I looked at how traditional banks do business and we did the opposite.”

In very practical terms, these stubborn, opinionated entrepreneurs frequently show up after the aid and development models have failed or at least failed to become sustainable. Their arrival on the scene is less a Kumbaya moment and more a “disruptive innovation” one.

Social entrepreneurs are relentlessly focused on what they have learned. Their conversations highlight the innovations that are rolled into ingenious, often cross-sector models and well as the people who use these models to solve their own and others’ problems. Their resource requests are framed by why their model should be scaled and how it can replace less effective approaches. The primary goal for these innovative social entrepreneurs is to demonstrate that appropriate capacity building and scale enable their hybrid or for-profit innovation models to solve problems sustainably, thus reducing dependence on fundraising.

Social entrepreneurs have offered these five critical solutions to the problem of making the Sustainable Development Goals truly sustainable:

1. Recognize that commitments to achieving the SDGs must avoid Einstein’s famous definition of insanity: Doing the same thing and expecting different results.

2. Replace unsustainable practices with new models that leverage under-utilized resources and other sustainable approaches.

3. Redeploy resources from the inadequacies of donor, foreign aid and impact investment processes and into new models and leadership that move significant resources from unsustainable approaches to sustainable ones.

4. Reinvent how organizations request and deploy funding by moving to scale solutions that are more sustainable than those that failed to achieve most of the MDGs.

5. Reassess all investments, models and approaches. The most sustainable solutions must be aggressively adopted across sector and country boundaries, no matter their origin or disruption.

Increasingly, leaders are being asked to challenge the status quo. These leaders — often disruptors — no longer target seed stage or individual impact investments. The most impactful leaders know that pilots do not lead to scaling or to sustainability.

Social entrepreneurs thrive at risk-taking and from learning rapidly about what doesn’t work. These are the sustainable, scale-oriented models and management teams that are best equipped to handle significant capital and to shift how these goals could actually be achieved — shifting from unsustainable and un-achieved to sustainable and achieved development goals.

The article is co-authored with Dr. Amit Kapoor, India, and the Shared Value Initiative India, which connects the business and community leaders towards defining the practice of shared value in India.

David Wilcox is the founder of ReachScale, an organization that aligns the social responsibility goals of corporations with high potential social entrepreneurs working in areas of common interest. ReachScale is a response to the number of exciting and… [Read more about David Wilcox]

[Entire post — click on the title link to read it at Sustainable Brands.]

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