Customer to Competitor

Old Wine in a New Bottle

As late as 1999, Kodak clung to its belief in the permanence of film cameras, slowing down its foray into digital technology. The company had to fight back its way into the market when rivals from outside photography like Canon and Sony had already established an advantage. Kodak simply did not “get” the customer need for convenience that digital cameras catered to.

Power of Passion

The search for Excellence takes us back to Kindergarten

Learning the ABC’s

In the highly technical fields of information technology and medicine, there’s nothing short of a quagmire of acronyms and complex detail. When the two intersect, the swamp grows exponentially. You might think you’d need a number of advanced degrees to create success, but as it turns out, with a nod to Robert Fulghum, all you really need to know you learned in kindergarten.

Winning with Wikinomics

Another milestone in Wikinomics history occurred recently when the online movie rental company Netflix concluded a three-year contest for a system to improve movie recommendation accuracy on its site by 10%. Two global teams ended in a virtual dead heat, with no winner of the $1 million prize to be declared until September. As the New York Times reported, “The contest, which began in October 2006, has already produced an impressive legacy. It has shaped careers, spawned at least one start-up company and inspired research papers. It has also changed conventional wisdom about the best way to build the automated systems that increasingly help people make online choices.”

Recommendation engines predict what a person might enjoy based on statistical scoring of that person’s stated preferences, past consumption patterns and similar choices made by many others. The goal was to improve the movie recommendations made by its internal software by at least 10 percent, as measured by predicted versus actual one-through-five-star ratings by customers. By a Nose at the WireWhen one team announced last month that it had passed the 10 percent threshold, it set off a 30-day race, under contest rules, for other teams to try to best it. That led to another round of team-merging by leading rivals who assembled a global consortium of about 30 members, appropriately called the Ensemble.