Time trumps Money in Innovation

My mom always said you either have time or money but rarely both.   Silicon Valley advisor and Fast Company contributor, AdrianOtt’s award-winning book, The 24-Hour Customer, gets right to this point. Time has become more important than money.  Time is finite, money isn’t (though it may seem like it a times).  When we make a decision about a product or service, we are really evaluating our time versus our cost, not just the price.  We evaluate where we have to go, what else we need to do and when we have to do it.  We may compromise what we want if it’s on our way to where we’re going – because it’s just easier.

For companies today, getting a share of customers’ time is harder than getting share of their wallet.  Adrian eloquently points out that since no one is making any more time, it’s value continues to greatly increase.  We are witnessing a major shift in customer buying behavior and needs: from the Time Value of Money to the Money Value of Time.  The companies that understand and capitalize on this shift will bring tremendous value to their customers, and in turn themselves.

Adrian’s knowledge of customers’ perception of time and its implication for buying behaviors is grounded in experience, observation, empirical studies and neuroscience.  Traditional companies tend to view products and services as the basis of competition and a task as a discrete event.  Innovative companies view customer activity as the basis of competition and a task in the context of all the tasks that customer has to do before, during and afterwards.  This is a significant competitive shift – from tangibles to intangibles –Time.  Remember, you are competing for customers’ “X” minutes of activity – what else could they do? who else could they hire, instead of you?  Adrian’s Time-ographics Framework is a great tool to assess how customers allocate their time and attention among a variety of products and services.

Throughout the book, Adrian provides tools, examples, and situations to help you understand your customers’ needs, constraints, and frustrations around Time.  She elaborates on the motivations and the role of habits, which are very hard to break, which drive customers’ time and attention and how to create solutions based on those.  Sometimes, the status quo, the path of least resistance while maybe not better, is faster.  Key to learning about your customers is their willingness to share their information with you.  Take for example Nike+.  The Nike+ service changed the customer relationship from transactional and periodic to an ongoing, integrated relationship with the runner creating an online running community that shares their health and run statistics.

In addition to sharing the factors that go into buying decisions based on customers’ value of time, Adrian provides experientially based wisdom on how companies can leverage these factors and build organizational wisdom and competency around them.   Since behaviors shift over time, over product or service use and with emerging technologies and markets, the model Adrian provides is dynamic, allowing companies to continually adapt to the emerging customer needs, and wants.

At the end, Adrian sums up the entire challenge of servicing 24-hour customers with one word: Trust.   In order to continue to help customers’ do the jobs they want done in a time-effective and efficient manner, customers need to trust that companies have their best interests, including privacy and security, in mind.  So many aspects of our 20^th Century world are changing.  How customers decide what, where, and when to buy is one of the most significant in our market economy.   Adrian’s book helps you think about this new world in ways you haven’t considered.  If you have, the book provides tools and methods to create solutions that matter and competencies that can be sustained.

Innovation in the Hopper

Edward Hopper is one of my favorite artists, so I was excited to see all his Maine works on exhibit at the Bowdoin Museum of Art.  A lot of his time in Maine was on Monhegan Island, a noted artists’ colony for over 150 years, close to us in Pemaquid. Hopper’s experimentation and evolution of style and technique remind me a lot of how we innovate.  I’ll explain in a minute.Monhegan Rocks and Seals (1916-19)

Hopper’s paintings became more realistic and less impressionistic over time.  His early paintings (1916-19’s) were very impressionist with deep texture and detail in the brushstrokes, such as Monhegan Rocks and Seals (1916-19).

And yet, Hopper goes back and forth between realism as in Captain Upton’s House Captain Upton's House (1927)(1927) and a bit of impressionism in my favorite of all his works, Pemaquid Light (1929), as he experiments and integrates the various styles and techniques (you can see the influence of Manet and Degas).  After this several year experimentation with impressionism, Hopper returns to his comfort zone: darker colors and more realistic representation – as in his very famous painting of a bar in Greenwich Village, Nighthawks (1942).    I get lost inPemaquid Light (1929) these paintings – I hear the men at the Pemaquid Light discussing their latest catch, where the stripers are running; I eavesdrop on the couple’s conversation at the bar.

As we innovate over time, our style and technique also evolve and blend.  The ways we interact, write, design and communicate shift as we have more experiences and relationships.   The shift is rarely linear – a few steps forward, a few backward, a few sideways, a few perpendicular.   Why? Because we are experimenting, seeing what works and what doesn’t work, blending aspects of both into new forms and Nighthawks (1942)techniques.  Think back to how you have approached business and life as you’ve matured.  Our perceptions of the world, of others, of global events have all changed and hence, impacted our view of needs, problems and solutions.

So, how has your perspective changed over time? What have you learned through the varied experiences and relationships of your life that you can apply to when, how, where, why you innovate? How can you turn those learnings into solutions that impact lives as much as paintings impact souls?

Connect-Inspire-Transform Well Lived

BIF’s motto is Connect-Inspire-Transform.  That’s exactly what happens at the magical BIF conferences.  We hearChristine Costello, Eli Stefanski, Katherine Hypolite, Chris Flanagan, Tori Drew incredible stories, have profound conversations, eat and drink (even al fresco!), and have Wi-Fi.  What more could we need?

Connect-Inspire-Transform is also what it takes to make the magic happen.  Oh, along with some collaboration and leadership, which define the smiling faces of BIF team: Tori Drew, Chris Flanagan, Katherine Hypolite, Eli Stefanski, Christine Costello, Jeff Drury, James Hamar, Sam Kowalczyk, and Saul Kaplan.  At BIF-7, these folks are so welcoming, smiling and make it all seem so simple.  And perhaps at some level it is simple, but it’s definitely not easy. 

The BIF team is authentic.  They truly live and breathe their mission – it’s not just a saying or a goal, it’s a way of life; it’s how they work.  There are many moments of more perspiration than inspiration, of last second changes.  BIF’s core values remain constant throughout.  That’s part of the paradox of innovation – the need for the stability of core values and beliefs to transform our world for the better.  Having been privileged to sit in for a brief moment of rest and nourishment with Olga’s fabulous tarts (and #innopies) before BIF-7, the passionate kaleidoscope of laughter, frustration, triple checking, sighs, and smiles was palpable, and powerful.

One example stands out.  BIF was live streaming.  My friend and client, Matt Hlavin of Thogus was at BIF (along with a bunch of “Clevelanders” who were nagged into going to BIF, gratefully).  During Angela Blanchard’s story, Matt’s right-hand, Lisa Lehman, watching it live in Avon Lake, OH, texted Matt that Angela didn’t have the ‘clicker’ in her hand seconds before Angela looked for the clicker!  Someone watching in real time, 650 miles Tori's "Magic" Shoesaway, was so engaged that she noticed such a detail!  And the next book for the Thogus leadership team’s “group” read is John Hagel’s Power of Pull along with Alex Osterwalder’s Business Model Generation.  That is the power of BIF – connecting people all over the world and inspiring them so they transform their worlds, miles and time zones away.  Next year, when you’re at BIF, remember that – and thank one of those BIF team smiling faces.