John McArthur’s New Venture Blog

I had the pleasure today of spending some time with Acopia, a leading supplier of file virtualization solutions.  For those of you who haven’t lived and breathed storage for the past 20 years, suffice it to say that file virtualization brings a number of benefits to file-server and storage administrators, not the least of which is flexibility for the buyer.  Which brings me to opportunity.  

If we’ve learned anything over the last 300 years, it is that flexibility can be just as valuable as capability.  The Revolutionary War in the British colonies more than 200 years ago showed the benefit of flexibility over the much more capable British Regulars.  I flew back from Europe a few years ago sitting next to a NATO general, and we spoke at length regarding NATO’s re-engineering efforts, as they increased focus on flexibility.  Prior to the re-engineering efforts, no one would have doubted NATO’s capabilities, but certainly NATO’s flexibility could be called into question. (more…)

When I worked at market researcher, IDC, I met Tony Ulwick, CEO of Strategyn, who is a pioneer in the field of outcomes-based innovation.  The folks who introduced me to Tony were from Innosight, which is a company founded by Clayton Christensen.  IDC’s notion at the time was that by partnering with Innosight and Strategyn, we could provide a service to technology companies to help them with product innovation.  This assistance would help those technology companies innovate to better serve the jobs (or achieve the outcomes) that their customers or prospects were trying to do.

One of the basic premises of the methodology is that customers can “hire” a variety of things to get the job done.  Here’s a simple example.  You’re stuck in an airport for several hours, as I was today, and you are looking for something to do.  What are the things that you could “hire” to pass the time or prevent boredom?  (more…)