Wayne Munro at the 2015 Innovation Forum
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Wayne Munro shares his business story establishing and growing SLI Systems at the 2015 Innovation Forum
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Wayne Munro at the 2015 Innovation Forum
- 1. A Personal View on Innovation Wayne Munro
- 6. GlobalBrain “put the things that people click on to the top”
- 9. SUCCESSFUL COMPANY MORE WORK DEAL INVESTMENT WORK IDEA Learning Web Search SUCCESSFUL COMPANY MORE WORK DEAL INVESTMENT WORK IDEA
- 10. Collapse – Internet Crash
- 11. RESULT LUCK WORK IDEA SLI Systems – the Early Days RESULT LUCK WORK IDEA
- 12. SITE CHAMPION LEARNING NAVIGATION SEARCH SUGGESTIONS LEARNING SEARCH SLI Systems SITE CHAMPION LEARNING NAVIGATION SEARCH SUGGESTIONS LEARNING SEARCH
- 13. Social Networking Learning Search
- 14. Modern SLI
- 15. Quake Response
- 16. Other Parts of My Personal Story
- 17. Innovation Summary Fun Comes from being within a system Competition and pressure can lead to innovation Only looks easy in hindsight Ideas are not enough Processes need innovation too Innovations are often layered You can make space for innovation
- 18. Implications for NZ The world is being increasingly dominated by IT IP will be the currency of the future Only new innovation creates new IP Currently innovators are rare - but they shouldn’t be Management practices need to allow innovation to happen
- 19. Innovation Skills Independent thinking Ability to understand systems Desire to understand Communication Observation
Editor's Notes
- To give my take on innovation I am going to take you quickly through my story, including some of the high points along the way – but especially dwelling on the events which have contributed to my perspective on innovation. If you read a book on innovation then you will no doubt find a number of really good points which I am not going to cover, but I am going to base this on my no doubt biased personal experience
- When I look on my life, the start of the path that bought me here was evident quite early <image> - as a youngster I always wanted to know how things worked – this manifested in a few different ways, I would take things apart – and sometimes I’d be able to put them back together. I loved to build things, and I am told that I used to talk a lot and ask a lot of questions – my parents bought me a subscription to a science magazine, I suspect just to shut me up. Early life lesson on innovation “it is fun”
- Move on a few years and I was studying Civil Engineering at the University of Canterbury. University was a ramp up in the skills learning process, but they were becoming more abstract You would learn how to design a beam, but not just using a chart to figure out what size it would be, but the underlying theory that would be used to put the chart together – this greater degree of knowledge allowed a flexibility of methodologies. Also the project work with the classes produced some healthy competition which would drive ever more unusual designs to produce the most optimized solution. Lesson: “you need an understanding of the system to innovate within it” And “competition can lead to optimization requiring innovation”
- Blending on from the Civil engineering degree was my post-grad time – where I took the skills and methodologies that I had learnt from civil engineering and applying them to the much more difficult structures of a woollen yarn. I owe thanks to the Wool Research Organisation of NZ for sponsoring this work and it was another great learning experience. Completing a Ph.D requires some innovation, almost by definition – And I learnt here that innovation is hard – and it can take a lot of work to determine if some ideas are good or not. Lesson: good ideas can be hard to find
- Following my Ph.D I worked for WRONZ as a textile scientist – the lessons that I had learnt were repeated. Good ideas are hard to find, and getting an idea is just the start of the journey. Reality starts to bite in this environment too – the work to develop ideas needs to be paid for – this introduced resource constraints – often just in the form of restricted time. If you are committing to solving a problem with a particular set of resources, then you’d better be sure exactly what you are planning to do and know what the chances of success were – of course this is limiting the scope of innovation as the degree of risk that you are prepared to take on is also limited. A valuable lesson learnt in this phase was that you need to be very objective about the technology choices that you make – I was guilty here of the cardinal sin of a software engineer – having been given a project – in this instance building a system to visualize the economic pipeline for NZ wool – I convinced myself that one particular visualization technology was the right one for the job. In hindsight I was attracted to the shiny new technology for interactive 3d modelling – this choice was a significant contributor for the project never producing a useful outcome. The guilt of this has stood me well in the rest of my career. Ensuring the best possible decision is made for technologies – sometimes you have to use the new shiny thing, but not nearly as often as you will be asked for it. Multi-variate calculus Lesson: make technology choices carefully
- Soon I was enticed away into the fairly new internet industry, working with long term Friend and now serial entrepreneur Grant Ryan as he started on the first venture that He is known for, GlobalBrain – the learning web search. Learning search was a proposal for a method for making searching on the internet better. I was lucky enough to be involved in GlobalBrain from day zero – right from the after the original conception – the simple statement “put the things that people click on at the top” – there was the innovation, and as with a lot of successful innovation, it seems simple and obvious in hindsight. However as we have seen with innovation, there is a lot to go from there to a successful product – deciding how to collect that click data, how to store the data that was collected and determining the actual algorithms used to decide which results to put to the top. I can say that the decisions that were made then are still present in the learning technology, about 18 years on, so we must have got something right. Then you needed to build prototypes, and find someone to sell the idea to – and it was a minor miracle that this all happened… in fact as time passed it became more and more clear what an unlikely success Grant managed to pull off there. A deal was done with Snap.com and the entire prototype was re-written as Snap demanded that the technology be re-written using the database of their choice. Lesson: Often innovation only looks obvious in hindsight
- Within a year or two, not only has Snap.com merged with a couple of other companies to become NBCi, the internet arm of NBC, but the GlobalBrain company was now the NZ R&D arm of NBCi. Initially we were just running their search re-ranking for them (the learning search product), then later we were building tools for them to manage and manipulate the results. Soon we were also doing other projects within their technology stack, nothing to do with search at all. It is a credit to the engineers that we had in NZ that we gained a reputation within this international company for being able to deliver the what we said we would deliver. There were also some projects that were accomplished on very tight deadlines, sometimes as ‘rescue’ events. One event I remember quite well was to develop a small flash program to deliver a random message with voiceover – sort of like a magic 8 ball that talks. The problem was it was to be timed with a particular event within a TV series (Passions) – the US engineers had been working on it for a while and could not get it working. We got a call one afternoon, were asked if we could give it a go, but this was now a mere 3 days before the deadline – and we did not have much experience with working with flash. Well we saved the day, got the project finished on time and it went out with the tv show. Developing some novel solutions to upload speeds and audio file streaming along the way. I think there is lesson here similar to what was learnt earlier, just as competition can provoke innovation, so can deadlines… not something that I’d like to depend on, but there is an aspect of this in modern agile development techniques in terms of committing to completing your short term sprint targets.
- Sometimes innovation is not planned, and it is the right people in the right place with the right information and the right skills. While with NBCi we developed ‘search suggestions’ – the idea here was given a search term, we would suggest other search terms that were ‘related’. There were other services offering to do this at the time, but almost all of them were doing lexical matches – given a word such as ‘dog’ they would suggest other phrases which contained the original word – such as ‘hairy dog’, ‘large dog’, etc. What was developed at GB was a nonlinear, nonlexical matching system – based on the organic data that we were using to power the search. The early stages were was a what we were calling at the time a ‘black op’ - basically an un-authorized piece of work. The first prototype (well the second actually, the first was broken) revealed an amazing power of word connection that we had gained from the algorithm. I remember some of the initial searches – a search for ‘1066’ suggested ‘battle of hastings’ – and a search for ‘bill Clinton’ suggested (very topically for the time) both ‘cigar’ and ‘monica Lewinsky’ There is an important message here – these search suggestions were one of the more important developments in the company and it did not come from a designated project to build better suggestions – it was a couple of engineers who knew their source material very well and saw something that could be developed from it. There are lessons about the value of a bit of spare time to muck about with, about the value of having staff who deeply understand the systems that they are working in. Lesson: often innovation requires a depth of knowledge, but can still be unplanned
- Lets review where we are, started with a innovative idea, did work on it, got investment, and made a Deal. This was followed up with more work and a large amount of innovation in its own right – the search suggestions being only an example. We ended up with a group of about 30 people working in NZ as the R&D arm of NBCi
- Then sadly the dubious internet business models of the late 90s came crashing down. It turns out that it you are selling something for less than it costs you to produce it then you cannot make up for it with volume. This is a simplification I know, but there were a lot of very crazy things going on at the time. NBCi was unfortunately a victim of this crash, NBC stepped in and for various reasons controlled the careful shutdown of the company. Every cloud has a small silver lining however, and despite all having been laid off there was an opportunity there for the learning search technology to be taken in a different direction, providing Search for individual sites (such as ecommerce sites). The lesson here I think is that sometimes just identifying an opportunity could be considered innovation – though perhaps I am stretching the term a little here. I believe however that it is innovation to take an existing technology and applying it to a different problem. The deal to buy back the IP for the learning search from NBC would probably be considered innovation on its own, and SLI Systems was born.
- So SLI Systems was started with 5 staff from the former GlobalBrain group. (a quick note here that SLI stands for ‘search’, ‘learn’, ‘improve’ – don’t let you engineers name things) we had the learning search, but there were a number of technical components and a whole lot of business processes that we didn’t have. We had to figure out how to manage the many individual site searches, and we had to fill in a lot of technology gaps – we needed a crawler, and indexer and a results display system. We had to build redundant systems and tools for the multiple clients. On top of all that we also needed to figure out how to find potential customers and how to sell to them. Obviously there was a lot of work to make it happen. The early success of SLI was no certain thing – took a while before we could support a customer, and even then it was due to a couple of lucky first customers that we managed to pull through. There was some bad luck along the way – the world trade center tragedy was very soon after the start of SLI, depressing the global commerce market.
- But SLI did manage to get on its feet – and there was a fair bit of innovation along the way. Figuring out how to deliver software as a service, and we were one of the early players in this market – it was not known at the time, and this was a stumbling block to some early sales – as years passed and SaaS became accepted this has become a bonus rather than a difficulty. The acronym allegedly first appeared in an article called "Strategic Backgrounder: Software As A Service," internally published in February 2001 by the Software & Information Industry Association's (SIIA) eBusiness Division We had to figure out how to deliver search results with high uptime, our SaaS approach required better systems that most sites were employing at the time (in fact better than most are using now) – though I will confess we copied some ideas from what some of the larger players were doing (such as google) And our innovation continued – I call it innovation layering here – as our new developments were standing on the shoulders of our earlier developments. We developed learning navigation, extending the learning search to category pages and we used all of our previous technologies in concert to develop ‘site champion’, our search engine optimization program. Lessons: some innovations are forced upon you (SaaS) innovations often build on top of previous innovations.
- Joint venture with another company Provide learning search for a social network Get the learning from your friends, friends, friends Up to 500 per iteration Sometimes good technology is not enough The social network we were working with did not dominate Sometimes innovation is not enough.
- SLI is now a company of around 180 staff spread over 5 countries. As SLI has grown, a portion of our need for innovation has been around our internal processes. Within the engineering department we have seen frequent change in how the team was organized – at each stage we then outgrew the previous methodology and had to figure out something new. In the early days we had a single engineering team, they were responsible for the core product development and the implementation and maintenance of the clients. This was necessary at the time as not only did we only have a small team, but we were still learning to build the searches as well. Once we got a number of clients under our belt the time conflicts between the time working on clients and the time building the product became clearer – we then split the teams – having a team for each function. An obvious aspect of SaaS is that the clients are indefinitely asking for enhancements and modifications. For simplicity our early model was that the engineer that built a search was responsible for any changes on that client – this was great because they always understood the idiosyncrasies of the clients that they were dealing with. However three problems with this approach became clear with time - if an engineer was away, the others didn’t understand the client implementation - our more senior staff had the most clients assigned to them, and so spent most of their time doing the maintenance, and all the new implementations were being done by the newer staff (so not only were the senior staff less happy, but we were not maximizing the quality on the new searches. - and the siloing of the searches to individuals made it hard to ensure that they were standard – compounding the first problem We solved the first two issues by developing task pools, splitting the engineers into groups of 5-8 and allocating each group a set of clients – so clients were now held by the group, rather than the individual – client knowledge was held by the group and so when one of the members was away there was no drama. Describe the picture of the alert lights. We have also tried to put together an office culture that is consistent with our beliefs and needs, and one that we can be proud of – it is open with a fairly flat hierarchy – as well as trying to maintain the fun that we had with a smaller team. In order to try and continue the benefits of the ‘black ops’ which had been so successful in the past, but doing it in a fair way we introduced ‘innovation days’ – this was one day (and we try for 3-4 per year) which the staff are given to try and do anything that they want – hopefully something with potential use to the company, but that is not enforced. The only condition is that they then have to give a 5 minute presentation on what they accomplished. Our innovation days get a wide range of ideas: - spelling champion – watches the live feeds of clients and identifies whenever a word is spelt wrong and adds them up by nationality – when the first country gets to the top of the page then they are crowned the worst spellers and their national anthem is played. - search builder – and engineer put together a very rough prototype of a possible way of solving the problem the we had with our searches not being standard – it replaces a base set of 1000 lines of code that defined how to process the clients feed of products with a series of drag and drop operations – this meant that each search would be developed in roughly the same way – making maintenance easier. We had talked about this previously, but here was a way forward that it could be done – this project was resources and has been our principal method of processing client data for a couple of years with huge success. One final point about our office is that we are surprisingly multi-cultural – in order to get the people that we want we have imported a number from overseas – we needed native speakers for our Brazilian and Japanese clients. To celebrate this we started hanging the national flag of the country of origin whenever we had a staffmember start from a new country. Currently there are 29 flags hanging from the 80 staff that we have in the NZ office. Promise of change each year. Lessons: Processes need innovation too Innovation is not static You can make space for innovation
- An innovation hotbed Offices Methodologies Rebuilds – quickly Data delivery race (3 days to texas) A close call that our search servers were not hosted here Innovation can be the little things Hedge clippers Slings Software Award Lesson: cool innovation can happen under pressure
- And to complete my personal innovation story, a couple of my non-work projects that have been completed over the years, and that I am particularly proud of… A motor home conversion from an old school bus, but with a custom made inner sprung bed which lowers from above the driver… And an electric car, modified from a 1964 Ford Anglia Van – which has been my sole transport round town since last Christmas.
- Innovation is fun Innovation comes from being embedded within, and understanding a system – it is not a moment of epiphany Both competition and pressure can lead to innovation Innovation only looks easy in hindsight – it is hard Having the idea is not enough, there is a lot of work to do after that – sometimes it is not enough Don’t forget to innovate in your processes – innovation is about more than just tech and manufacturing Innovations are often built on previous efforts, your previous innovations can be your greatest asset. You can’t force innovation, but you can make it space to happen This is what you need to try and train into people to increase the chance of being successful in innovation.
- IT domination – self drive cars, 3d printing. Currently innovators are rare – but everyone should be an innovator, and they should be applying that approach to everything that they do, all day, every day. Our management practises need to allow for innovation – they need to be able to be questioned. If the best answer to why your company has a particular practise or rule is “that’s the way it is done”, then that is probably not good enough. Observation Communication Hard work Realism Creativity Luck Strive for understanding Don’t accept the status quo Be objective about technology and methodology choices