The Official Fluid Blog

I attended the GlobalLogic Innovate! conference on Tuesday and Wednesday in Palo Alto. We work with a development team from GlobalLogic (formerly Cubika) in Argentina. Although some of the sessions were geared towards a more corporate audience and were a bit dry (imho), some of the other sessions had some interesting perspectives on innovation that directly applied to Fluid. Some highlights:

Sal Khan
Sal Khan, the founder of the Khan Academy, talked about how the Khan Academy came into existence and now thrives. The Khan Academy is turning the educational system on its ear by allowing students to master material independently at home, and better leverage teachers time at school to help struggling students and to synthesize the basic materials into more interesting projects. (Of course it also works great for independent study without any classroom time at all.)

The Khan Academy uses YouTube for instructional videos, offers online tests, and organizes all the materials. It also provides a dashboard for teachers or parents to oversee the work of their students. There is nothing especially trailblazing in the technology. They offer valuable content (the courses) in a way that scales well on the internet. Sal saw and addressed an immediate (and initially fairly modest) need, which grew incrementally based on concrete needs. And the result is a revolutionary fix for a problem as daunting as our befuddled educational system.

Geoff Moore
Geoff Moore is a venture capitalist and old school high tech Silicon Valley guru.

We need discipline around innovation. It is not inherently good. One must consider the return on the investment in innovation. We should focus on the key “moments of engagement” in your business (such as the initial impression of a PDP, for example). There are 3 goals of innovation:

• Differentiation: Break new ground. Must be ambitious.
• Neutralization: Keep up with your competitors (Microsoft is the master of this). Must be fast.
• Productivity: Save money. This equates to “best in class”, which is not terribly sexy but can be good business.

The three goals are mutually exclusive. Deliberately choose which you want, and maintain discipline to achieve it.

Tom Fishburne
Tom is a “marketoonist”. He was previously the VP of marketing at Method Soap, a company that depends on innovation to survive. Before that he worked at General Mills, a company that does not.

“Usage is like oxygen for ideas.” It is hard to get meaningful feedback from focus groups about products or product categories that do not yet exist. It is almost an oxymoron. A better alternative is to take products to market and see how they do.

In order to innovate, one must dare to differentiate and take risks with those differentiations. When innovating it is important not to dilute the creative ideas to the point that they no longer differentiate and are therefore irrelevant. To innovate one must nurture the germ of the creative ideas, and make them more revolutionary rather than safer. Most good ideas get killed by over-cautiousness.

10 reasons many ecommerce platforms fail when it comes to custom products. In random order:

1. As a practical matter it is impossible to represent all the permutations of a product in the product database. If there were 6 configuration options, each with 10 different colors, this would represent 10*10*10*10*10=1,000,000 different products. Now imagine you offer 10 different configurable products. Many ecommerce platforms cannot handle this large a catalog. Even if it can, this number of redundant products would make managing the catalog highly inefficient.

2. The configuration of the ordered product has to be stored in the order management system and associated with a specific order, which many systems are not able to do.

3. Many platforms are not able to charge a variable price based upon configuration options. For example, adding your name to a pair of RbkCustom shoes costs more.

4. Ecommerce platforms are not prepared for product components to go out of stock. For example, when you are manufacturing items custom you could run out of the red material for the side stripe. Ecommerce platforms expect inventory to be handled on a SKU level.

5. At least one custom image usually needs to stored with each configured product that is ordered. The ecom system needs to allow these images or URL’s pointing to them to be stored with each order.

6. The ecom system needs to be able to send the order to the manufacturing system. The manufacturing system is usually a different system than their standard order fulfillment system, which typically requires some custom configuration or development within the ecom system.

7. We typically need to be able to navigate from the ecom system back into the configurator, usually from the wishlist or the shopping cart. The ecom system needs to be able to differentiate between custom and in-line products and route these requests appropriately.

8. On a more general level, the ecom system has to be able to handle both custom and in-line products. The handling of the different types of products will differ throughout the system, including the things we have already mentioned (pricing, purchasing, navigation in and out of the cart, etc), as well as things like product detail pages, product representations on category pages, etc.

9. This isn’t technically part of the ecom system but custom products usually complicate customer service. There is typically a different return policy for custom products. Order status information for custom orders is typically in a different system than that of in-line product orders.

10. This is also outside the core ecom system but the shipping mechanism for custom products usually differs; at a minimum, the origin point will be different. Dealing with the shipment of heterogeneous orders can be complicated. Should these orders be consolidated? How much should the customer be charged for shipping? How much insight should the consumer have into the shipping complexities?