Can Apple disrupt Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo in the gaming market? Although not a single one of these companies would say that this is even a remote possibility it is still interesting to analyze their incentives from a disruptive perspective:

• Sony, for instance, has very little incentive to create games such as HarborMaster or Bejeweled 2. Although they are very popular on the iPhone they are way too simple for their core market – teenagers that can memorize 26 combinations for most creative kills. Instead we should expect Sony’s gaming consoles to gain ever more processing power making it possible to create ever more advanced games.
• Apple has every possible incentive to improve the iPhone and iPod to make better and better games for a wider and wider audience. This means that they should be able to pick up more and more customers left behind Sony and Microsoft. My dad, who is 71, got an iPhone a year ago. The last time he played a computer game was in 1986 when I tried to get him to play Defender of the Crown from Atari. Today he has well over 10 iPhone games that he has paid for (Chess and Flick Fishing most popular) and plays them all the time.
• And although Sony may try it – they still have little incentive to develop an outstanding phone with their PSP. People don’t buy it to use as a phone – they buy it to play games with. This may hurt their chances of getting vast, cheap bandwidth.
• iPhone users consume 10 times more bandwidth than any other phone, but AT&T is working hard to meet this demand and has every incentive to do so. So which device may be better placed for super-popular, destined to be eve more popular, online games such as Halo or World of Warcraft?

If Apple develops a large screen iPod Touch which has been rumored forever now, they have an instant ability to create even better games for an ever expanding market. The incentives in these markets certainly seem to suggest that Apple, right now, can and will grow their gaming market while Sony can and may want to cede their gaming market.

Classic disruption.

Sony’s best response to Apple would be to either compete with them head-on for this new, growing gaming market (maybe through SonyEricsson…but they have had a hard time coming up with a phone people want lately) or to use their assets to find another intersection entirely.

Amazing new imagery from the Hubble Telescope. it is now more ten times more sensitive and here are the first images from our giant eye in the sky. Go here to learn more: http://hubblesite.org/

The latest issue of Speaker Magazine has me as the cover story where I give some suggestions for how to innovate in general and for speakers in particular. I find the entire industry of speaking quite interesting – it is a world entirely unto its own with a set of rules and traditions that it takes some time to learn and then question.

Speaking is also something I love doing while also discovering that I am pretty darn good at it – always a fun combination! After having seen tons and tons of speakers from all over the world I believe that there are common mistakes people make in their presentations. Some have to do with the slides people use (assuming they use slides) and sites such as Presentation Zen are a good help for reminding people that slides should be simple, clean and balanced while also being unique and provocative. Some have to do with the failure to tailor to your audience (CEOs of Fortune 50 are different from front-line workers for those same companies). I have often found, however, that many people forget that points made during a presentation should also be delivered through punches, emotional rollercoasters, and surprises – even in small ways. People have asked me about this many times and I will share some ideas on this on my blog, but for now here is a quick example of this principle in a tiny way:

After a couple of minutes in a presentation I often want to make the point that all new ideas are combinations of existing ideas (a core notion of The Medici Effect). I also want give people a subtle sense of that these combinations are 1) surprising and 2) requires us to rethink our existing assets, processes, strategies and resources although I will make both points explicitly a few minutes later. So how to do that within 30 sec or less?

Well, one can just say it, but that would be boring. All theorems are better remembered if coupled to an example. You could show a slide of this happening. At this point I have been using slides (I will have covered some 50 slides in about 5-6 minutes, but that is another story) and even shown an example of unusual combinations, such as termites and architecture. So I would like to change the medium.

Here is how I do it: I will have a water bottle with me on stage, and maybe had a sip or two from it…but the cap of the bottle is on in either case. So I now take the bottle, remove the cap and tell people that the screwcap is one idea. That already is surprising because the audience is not thinking of the bottle as a prop for a presentation. It immediately sends the message that you can find insight in unexpected places – and I do not have to mention this at all. I then pull out a light bulb from my pocket telling people this is another idea. By combining them: screwcap + lightbulb Edison found a way to attach his invention – an innovation that has lasted for a long time. I use the water bottle for the rest of the presentation to drink form and many people have told me that every time a take a sip – it sends a small message of using stuff around you in new and unexpected ways.

Lately I have innovated by developing The Medici Experience, which is a combination of a live performance and a transformational workshop. I just did one yesterday for a major, global client. It is an all-day event where the emphasis is to push the creation and execution of new ideas through the diversity of everyone present while also providing strategic frameworks and inspiration. The thing that I love about it is that it scales – it can be done for hundreds, potentially even thousands of people. It took quite some time to figure out how to crack that, but it seems to be going beautiful now. These Medici Experiences been very, very successful as I believe organizations, perhaps more than ever, want and need clear outcomes from their internal events. I am obviously also doing these types of events publicly (the next one is in San Jose next week – go to it if you can!)

Next week we are having The Medici Experience in San Jose, CA. It is on September 24^th, and you can find the details here.  I am really, really excited about this project because it is fundamentally a way for us to create change on a larger scale – to help cities and regions grow. Grow ideas, opportunities and jobs. It is terrific that the city of San Jose will host the event and can see the need for innovation in driving growth.

The idea for The Medici Experience came out of my strong desire to avoid just having a whole lot of talks with panels and keynotes while the audience sits still and does little. Instead I am imagining bringing 100s (even thousands as we scale) of people together from different backgrounds and disciplines within a region and have them work together to unleash an explosion of transformational ideas related to their day-to-day efforts, and then move as far along as possible towards making the best ideas happen. All in one intense, fast and furious day.  Everywhere I’ve done this it’s been extremely successful – whether within corporations or for the public such as our event in Trinidad earlier this summer.

Anyway – hope you can join us! We are doing this for the city of San Jose and so the fee is a very reasonable $195 to get a chance to interact with others looking to innovate and a chance to hear me present some of the fundamental aspects of Medici Effect theory.

See below for some indication of the energy that will follow!

Volvo has delved into a new, fascinating, and intersectional, initiative.  The car company’s vision is to develop a collision safety system for automobiles based on the African grasshopper’s ability to not collide when it flies in swarms.

Scientists have discovered that the African locust has a unique internal radar system composed of a giant movement detector behind the eyes. The visual input is instantly transmitted to the insect’s wing nerve cells – seemingly bypassing the brain. The detector releases bursts of energy when the locust is on a collision course, which allows it to move out of the way quickly. Jonas Ekmark, preventive safety leader at Volvo Safety Division, points out how amazing it is that these grasshoppers can fly around in a chaotic swarm, looking for food, yet never once collide with each other. He feels that the discovery about the locust’s radar system has the potential of yielding information that could be used to develop new technology to cut down on road traffic accidents.

The connection between the locust’s sensory system and a potential road traffic safety system was made by Dr. Claire Rind at Newcastle University, in the UK. When asked how she came up with it, she answers that she thinks it came from her own experience as a driver and a pedestrian. Locusts are quick to react and have reliable circuits, and they can do their computations against a lot of background chatter, which is quite similar to driving a vehicle around town. And so she realized that the locust’s ability may be available in the context of road traffic safety.

Volvo safety division heard about Dr. Rind’s research, and thought it could be of use particularly in regard to pedestrian safety. The automobile company hopes to reproduce the locust’s radar system onto a computer chip, and install it inside a camera, which would compose the car’s safety system – although, so far, current hardware and software systems have proved unable to replicate the locust’s sensory system.

Sandra Ljung

If I throw a few words out there such as: Martha’s Vineyard, Cape Cod, preppy, classic, maritime, countryside, colorful fall foliage…chances are these words will evoke something within you, certain images perhaps. This holds true whether or not you’ve actually been to Martha’s Vineyard or Cape Cod, or whether or not you’ve witnessed the explosive colors of a New England fall. The fact that we perhaps know something about the place, whether it’s through reading, seeing pictures, or hearing stories about it, is enough for our imagination to start spinning. Quite often we are more open to acting on pure imagination when we are not faced with the barriers of reality that facts will pose. This phenomenon is at the core of what in literature, art, movies and design would be called romanticizing. Quite often romantic rendering comes across as phony and harmful,  but sometimes, for some people, it actually kind of works… This is the story of the hugely successful Lexington Company, an entirely Swedish company (although often mistaken for American by Swedes), that embodies the so called “New England design” trend.

Lexington Company was founded in 1997, and one of the founding partners and now CEO of the company is a Swedish woman by the name Kristina Lindhe. Her ambition has been to create a New England inspired life-style brand that includes everything from bed linen, towels, pillow cases and napkins to a new clothing line. The fabrics are very much inspired by the American flag in terms of colors and patterns. Stars and stripes, for example, are very prevalent. The materials have a high quality feel and look, and the home items, bedding, and linen are always beautifully shot in authentic New England locations and presented in big luxurious catalogues. Other characteristics of this style is the mix of the perception of “American preppy” with the rustic, and relaxed country-living. Dark wood furniture is set against white-washed walls and sofas covered in starch white fabric, trying to evoke perhaps a beach-house on the Cape. The name Lexington, a historic town in Massachusetts, was chosen, one can only assume, because it creates “the right” associations.

There is only one problem, however, with this so called New England style, I don’t quite recognize it from my time as a New England resident. The white interiors, with lots of natural light are more typical of Swedish decor, and I haven’t seen stars and stripes being used that widely on linen and quilts etc. in Boston or the Cape either.  I’ll agree to that there are elements of what I would characterize as typically New England that are included in this life-style concept. But it also contains a lot of Swedish aesthetics, creating a new style that is a unique blend of Swedish and American, and hence, a Swedish version of New England, where the romantic view of an area has inspired into the making of something different and new. It is perhaps the fact that Lexington has managed to integrate the essentials of Swedish aesthetics while at the same time tapping into Swedish consumers’ dreamlike notion of the American east coast, that they have become so successful.

So far one could say that Lexington is in a way “passing” for an American company. The logo, the website, the catalogues ooze Americana. In an interview in Sweden’s biggest daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter, a journalist asks CEO, Kristina Lindhe, why a brand such as Lexington hasn’t dared to enter the US market yet. Lindhe answers that it is part of the plan, but the timing has to be right. “You only get one chance”.

If and when they do, it will be very interesting to see if Lexington will be able to continue presenting itself as mainly “New England” or if it will start emphasizing its’ connections to Swedish design as well.  From the Medici point of view, I think this story is interesting, because it shows how a unique style, inspired by one side of the Atlantic, has developed and merged with Swedish style on the other side of the Atlantic, and managed to gain ground. The innovative aspect and the appeal to the Swedish consumer probably lies in this mix of aesthetics, even though the consumer, because of smart marketing and lack of knowledge about New England, may not always be that conscious of the mix, and accepts the style as mainly American. This life-style concept thus, both forms, confirms, and nurtures the consumer’s dreamlike notions of the east coast in a continuous interplay. And as such, the dream is kept alive…

Sandra Ljung

Frans here. It’s been a bit quiet on the blogging front. We, at the Medici Group, have been hard at work with a number of different projects around the world. Many of them are coming online this year – very exciting! One of them is a redesigned website for themedicieffect.com which will launch in March. Until then we will post some very intriguing and interesting stories, often focusing on cultural intersections, that will explore how the Medici Effect plays a part all around us. First up is a story from Sandra Ljung, the Medici team's most global resident – currently living in Sweden again, about how design concepts can cross borders…