109
Swope
management constraints. Skunk works are often used to initially roll out a product or service that thereafter will be developed according to usual business processes. The term ‘skunk works’ was first introduced during World War II by engineers at Lockheed Corporation who later copyrighted it. The most famous example of a skunk-works project from that time was the Manhattan Project, which developed the first atomic weapon. Although people have speculated that the name was inspired by the poor hygiene habits of overworked employees, it was, in fact, taken from the moonshine factory in a cartoon series called “Li’l Abner.” Flexibility, speed and limited managerial oversight are the three characteristics that make a skunk-works team effective. Street / B.O.P. Away from the mainstream homogeneity of mass-market culture, the developing world and the street cultures of the world’s largest cities create their own ways of innovating, often under unique financial or social constraints. From the Aravind Eye Hospital in India, which has performed over four million eye surgeries for free or at a low cost, to a mobile phone shop in Ghana, which can quickly make cheap, low-cost mobile phones that enable easy mobile banking and other transactions, to the invention of hip-hop and sampling culture at block parties in the South Bronx, pragmatism in answering different human needs with clever ideas makes this model of innovation effective and a great source of inspiration. Just-ship-it aka Agile aka Business-in-Beta The design and development of complex software systems has been transformed in recent years through relentless experimentation by developers, usually done in the market and in real time. One of the mantras that has emerged from the agile movement is “just ship it” meaning that a small slice of a complete system is developed and released while subsequent efforts are devoted to both releasing complimentary elements and to optimizing what has already been released. How might other companies in other industries gain inspiration from this methodology? A closely related, emerging idea from the start-up environment is of “business in beta” – the sense that a company should launch into the market quickly and modestly, and then use market learning to iterate its offer over time. This also begins to open up some interesting questions. If the old way was to build a product for an audience and then try to sell it to them, then business in beta is about building a conversation with an audience through a product or service while recognizing that the conversation will help make the product or service more relevant over time. The ability to release and converse with real customers quickly and in real time is what makes “just-ship-it” effective on a number of levels. Can aspects of it be applied to industry sectors that are stuck in the same way of developing new offers? Academic R&D partnerships The commercial revenue cycle is as fast as it is relentless. Companies often have neither the time nor the appetite for risk that innovation requires. Consultants offer some help in this regard, but also work under very tight schedules, thus making it difficult to create truly new-to-the-world innovation – let alone unique intellectual property. Technical universities like MIT, the Frauenhofer Institute in Germany and many others have long provided consulting services that seek to fill