Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

Reasonable counter-question: “What’s a ‘Hilbert Problem’?”

Everyone say hello to Professor Hilbert.

In 1900, German mathematician David Hilbert — one of the world’s most eminent mathematicians at the time — gave a famous lecture to the International Congress of Mathematicians. In his talk and in a related article, he laid out 23 problems that he took to be fundamental for his discipline to address in the 20th Century.

What will be the ends toward which the spirit of future generations of mathematicians will tend? What methods, what new facts will the new century reveal in the vast and rich field of mathematical thought?

These problems, Hilbert thought, were some of the the biggest, most central challenges facing mathematicians. Cracking any of them would constitute a major achievement for any mathematician, and indeed for the world of mathematics as a whole. Hilbert’s grouping of the problems fixed them firmly on the agenda of the mathematical world, and in the hundred-plus years since then, many of the problems have indeed been resolved. (You can see a full table of them here.)

Now, I don’t know about you, but I confess that I am not lying awake nights trying to pierce the veil of the Riemann hypothesis. My mathematical endeavors played out after I finished freshman-level calculus (and please don’t ask me to perform any differential equations now). But I do wonder what the equivalent of Hilbert’s 23 problems are for the business world.

So, all that to ask this:

What are the fundamental problems
that business needs to crack
in the 21st Century?

I’m fascinated to know what you think the best brains of the business world — or even me and my little brain — should be working on.

~

(Image via Wikipedia.)

My heavy-duty Twitter use has introduced me not only to folks far away, but also to members of the social media community right here in Austin. One new friend is Aruni Gunasegaram, the president and founder of Babble Soft. After we got to talk in person at SXSW, Aruni was kind enough to answer some of my questions about being an entrepreneur — and mom — who works at the intersection of technology and parenthood.

Aruni caught the business bug early — she had a paper route when she was 13. As an adult, she founded Isochron, for which she raised more than $15 million in equity financing. After she had kids of her own, her concern about baby sleep patterns, breastfeeding support, and other issues facing new parents led her to found Babble Soft. (As icing on the cake, she has also taught classes in entrepreneurship at my beloved alma mater.)

Here’s my interview with Aruni:

BIZ: In a nutshell, what is Babble Soft’s business?

Aruni Gunasegaram: Babble Soft creates web & mobile applications that help new parents communicate about childcare activities. Parents, their sitter, their nanny, or their family members can record and view daily activities to make sure the baby is getting what he or she needs.

BIZ: How did your business background lead you to start Babble Soft?

AG: My background helped me realize that there is an opportunity in this area to help people during the time they come home with a baby by providing them with valuable tools.

BIZ: Do you think that women entrepreneurs have a much different experience than men entrepreneurs?

AG: Yes, I believe women entrepreneurs do have a different experience than men mainly because there are fewer women high-tech entrepreneurs than there are men. Women have always been entrepreneurs on a smaller scale from restaurant to store management, but in high-tech it has typically been men on the playing field because the stakes are generally higher. By stakes being higher I mean financial, reputation, and time risk.

BIZ: How do you see Web and mobile technologies changing the ways that families operate?

AG: I see these technologies changing things by facilitating communication, connecting with other parents, providing instant information about problems they are facing, and finding things from house support to the best baby toy.

BIZ: What are your hopes for Babble Soft in years to come?

AG: My hope for Babble Soft is that we become a central part of parenthood by connecting new parents with other new parents in the different stages of a parenting career. We want to be the #1 online social community supported by relevant applications.

Thanks to Aruni for sharing these insights. Your own comments and questions are welcome here, or you can check out Babble Soft or Aruni’s EntrepreMusings blog to find out more.

My grandfather’s stopwatch sits on the desk next to my keyboard. It’s ticking.

Countless examples from the world of art support the idea that tight contraints can foster great creativity. For an easy set of examples, consider the formal patterns of poetry; the haiku, sonnet, and sestina forms, for example, have provided a playground for poets as great as Shakespeare and Issa. One of my favorite constrained forms is the Fibonacci sonnet, in which you write a story with successive sentences that have the same number of words as the corresponding entry in the Fibonacci sequence of numbers. (I’ve composed a few of these.)

The business world is full of constraints, too. You never simply have a project to complete, because you must carry it out:

• in a given time
• with a certain set of people
• within a certain budget
• in line with other objectives
• based on certain principles

And that’s only the tip of the iceberg.

When you’re really working creatively, you don’t ask for fewer constraints. You take the constraints you have and you do something amazing within them. Kathy Sierra talked about this brilliantly in this post:

How to make something amazing, right now 

You should rush over and read the whole thing, but here’s the crux:  “Big ass budgets and tons of time don’t necessarily produce better products.”

This viewpoint agrees with the one expressed in this new Fast Company post that talks about the work of Robert Stephens, the founder of Geek Squad.  On the topic of innovation, Stephens says this:

Ramen Noodles. This is why startups are so innovative. Large companies want to be nimble, that’s why they go to “idea” conferences. I suggest starve departments of money.

He’s right.

Ten minutes — time’s up. Amen.

It’s tempting, if you keep your head in the tech blogosphere, to think that the only meaningful pools of innovation to be tapped are in the traditional fields attached to computing and telecommunications — hardware, microchips, software, wireless transmission, etc. Then you read something like this:

Gibson shows new self-tuning guitar

. . . Nashville, Tenn., guitar maker Gibson and Tronical said Powertune is the world’s first self-tuning technology, and Gibson says it is particularly useful for beginners, who tend to find tuning a headache.

Musician Ichiro Tanaka, who tuned and played a sample guitar at Gibson’s Tokyo office Monday, said the technology is handy for professionals too. If they use special tuning for just part of a concert, as he often does, it means they don’t have to lug around an extra guitar with the second tuning ready.

“It’s more than just convenience,” said Tanaka, of Japan. “It’s a feature I really appreciate.” . . .

Kudos to Gibson for continuing the tradition of guitar innovation embodied in every Les Paul it makes. And thanks to my Hoover’s colleague Paula Smith (a hard-shredding guitarist herself) for pointing this out.

Om Malik has this short item about rolling out tech in the developing world to test and learn before rolling it out in the higher-stakes markets of the more-highly-industrialized world.

Emerging Markets As Cutting Edge Tech Test Beds

Worth reading, and worth contemplating how the phenomenon — which Malik addresses in business-technology terms — also applies to boosting environmental and social goods in the developing world, as discussed in this May 2007 post from WorldChanging:

Principle 8: Leapfrogging

Whatever angle you take on this — human development, green business, filthy lucre, whatever — it certainly seems worthwhile to test concepts in markets without an intrenched infrastructure that must be overcome. Doing so eliminates one of the major status-quo inputs to the market equation, which would seem to make experimentation easier.

This Esquire piece, even if it presents the Fahrenheit 212 consultancy in the best possible (or breathless?) terms, provokes interesting thoughts about how bigger companies could do things better, especially when it comes to innovating their way out of jams in the marketplace. Commentary follows excerpts.

This Company Will Save Your Brand

[After talking with F. 212 insiders,] You begin to have the tiniest understanding why monsters like Samsung, Warner Music, Hershey, and NBC have tapped little Fahrenheit 212 to defibrillate their brands.

. . . Here is how Fahrenheit 212 works: They don’t pitch clients; they wait for clients to come to them. When one does, all eighteen employees get on board with the project: creative directors (including one who worked in robotics for NASA and designed rides for Disney), finance experts, designers, business directors (including one with a psychology/philosophy masters from Oxford), a strategic analyst with degrees in sociology and international affairs, and an office manager who was an off-Broadway actor. The company then spends about five months spinning ideas, trying to turn the status quo on its head. Then they actually make whatever new products they dream up, presenting them to the client in ready-to-sell form. Often, what’s presented is the last thing a client expects but precisely what it needs.

. . . Up to two thirds of the firm’s total fee is contingent upon success. In other words, for it to make serious money, its ideas not only have to be market ready, they have to be successful once they get there.

. . . [Their new deodorant concept is] not a miracle cure or the discovery of a new species. But it’s unlike any deodorant, ever — a significant improvement on a mundane, unimprovable product. Which makes you wonder what Fahrenheit 212 might do with something bigger, like the music business. (They’ve been hired by Warner to help rethink the industry’s tired, failing business model.) Or bigger, even. Would it hurt to ask Fahrenheit to spend a few days lifting the hood on the oil industry? Or to do a “big, fast, and doable” (as Vuleta would say) brainstorm with the Sunnis and the Shiites?

Many big companies get so caught up in their own processes that they can’t hear themselves think — or they don’t let themselves think. As Seth Godin points out, you can spend nine-tenths of your day fighting battles inside the company or simply dealing with the cognitive overwhelm of our modern communications systems.

Here’s an observation-cum-philosophical ramble: An organization exists to organize the efforts of a group, so that the group can accomplish more than its members could accomplish individually. This implies specialization, which is why we have different departments for production, sales, finance, marketing, IT, and so on. But specialization — and the simple fact that organizations are large — means that there must also protocols in place to regulate the whole organism. Human nature being what it is, each one of us tends to focus on the protocols that mean the most to us personally, rather than on the best interests of the organism as a whole. It’s a natural by-product of working within an organization that is too big to be comprehended in its entirety. But it also means that we come to prize the protocols — SOPs, hierarchies, workflows — more than they deserve, i.e. not not as tools to achieve organizational ends, but as ends in themselves.

But not Fahrenheit 212. They’re a small band of hyper-creative outsiders, augmented by a few more hyper-creative contractors to do things like 3-D rendering. They don’t have a vested interest in the protocols of a particular company (Samsung, Warners, Hershey, etc.) or of the company’s industry (electronics, music, sweets, etc.). So not only are they not afraid of breaking crockery, they can move ahead without even knowing what crockery they’re threatening to break.

And — big surprise — they’re a ton more innovative than the big, typically bloated enterprises for which they work.

Keep doing things the same way you’ve been doing them, and it’s reasonable to expect that you’ll keep getting similar results — or eroding results, if your industry changes as fast as the electronics business or the music business. But if you’re willing to change things up and send the sacred cows to the slaughterhouse — which would seem to be one of Fahrenheit 212’s principal jobs — you might reap breakthrough success that for now exists only in your dreams.