Diaspora Matters

ZBIN continues to engage our Diaspora community especially our active members and the objective is to obtain helpful information about living in foreign land, opportunities that exist and a whole lot of information that is not easily available. Today 2 days before new year, we are fortunate to have a Zimbo sister now based in Kenya. Merryln Kudzai Chizanga -Kika is our official  ZBIN Kenya Contact and below she answers a couple of questions we posed to her.

Here is a true story of what happened some years back. A man (lets call him Mandebvu) places an advert in the newspapers inviting prospective lessees interested in leasing his land for commercial purposes. Hundreds of people respond and he invites them to an interview. During the interview he asks each applicant what sort of business they would like to undertake at his 2 hectare land along Simon Mazorodze Road.

Each applicant divulges information of what sort of business they would like to undertake, whether its profitable and how they would like to pay rental fees. At the end of interviews Mr Mandebvu promises all interviewees that he will respond to them in due course and will lease out his land to the best offer.

Two weeks later what does Mr Mandebvu do? Instead of leasing land as per the advert and interviews, he decides to implement the best business idea from one of the people he interviewed!!! He turns his land into a truck inn located along Simon Mazorodze…what a fraud! It turns out that he hoodwinked the public, he was not interested in leasing his land but interested in poaching business ideas from members of the public. He got free business information fraudulently!

Now this unethical business practice is said to be happening even in the banking sector where you submit your business proposal and someone within the banking system sees the potential of your business and they will turn down your credit application and go on and implement your business ideas, your business models or projects.

In some cases you are invited to rent commercial properties, once your business is thriving, goodwill developed, reliable clientele base developed and guess what will happen next? Your terms of lease agreements are altered or you are frustrated to leave so that the owner of the property can take over your business ideas.

Even ZBIN has not been spared. We gave funds to a well-known website developer to develop a website for the forum. Instead of registering www.zbin.co.zw under our name what does he do? He goes on to register www.zbin.co.zw under his name and changes the name of the site from Zimbabwe Business Ideas and Network and names it Zimbabwe Business Investors Network lol. He took all the website ideas and transferred it to this copy website.

He was a member of ZBIN who had followed all discussions, all updates of what we were doing and our dreams and aspirations. He saw the potential and unethically diverted our website. This is why ZBIN’s website is registered in USA under the dot.com address instead of dot.co.zw, someone unethically registered our name. Now the problem with stealing ideas is that your business will not last. If you are unethical then it is going to cost you in the long run. Take for example this rogue website developer, he was probably going to get a lot of mileage by associating with us. I had told him to do an excellent job so that more ZBIN members will be inspired and engage his services-so he will not get any positive mileage from us.

So we will encourage our members to exercise caution when conducting business activities be it interviews, potential partnerships or rent agreement negotiations. There are a lot of sharks out there who are looking at poaching business ideas. In next instalment I will talk about intellectual property and registering patents.

by Ralph Ohr

As rightly pointed out by Tim Kastelle recently, it’s imperative to distinguish discovery from execution when it comes to startup and innovation activities – bearing in mind that both purposes are complementary and equally important. Along with the case made in my previous post, this suggests following a dual approach to balanced corporate innovation management. The main objective of dual approaches is to sufficiently separate exploration-/discovery-oriented initiatives from exploitation-/execution-oriented ones (e.g. in terms of  dedicated tools and metrics to be applied) while at the same time ensuring an appropriate degree of connection and proper interplay among both parts.

In the following, I will outline a model that attempts to help organizations implement a dual approach to innovation management. This model uniquely condenses and combines learnings from recent research in this field as well as experiences of my own work with diverse companies in various industries. It aims to integrate objectives, activities, requirements and inherent tensions along the innovation spectrum as well as enabling aspects, often being discussed independently from each other. Therefore, it’s titled a model for integrative innovation management.

 

Essential premises for balanced and sustainable innovation management   

In my view, sustainably successful innovation management systems in organizations are required to be based on a couple of essential premises – all of which can be considered necessary conditions. As successful innovation management also relies on additional factors, they are no sufficient conditions, though.

Premise 1: Innovation management follows a balanced portfolio approach. The entire innovation portfolio is divided into exploitation-oriented and exploration-oriented innovation initiatives, where following characterizations hold:

• Exploitation-oriented initiatives are related to running core business by executing and enhancing existing business models or technological capabilities. The primary direction of impact is value capturing (commerzialization). Examples: Product, service or process innovation, portfolio extension, innovation of selected business model components (e.g. channel or operations), market research.
• Exploration-oriented initiatives are related to developing future business by searching for novel, and often disruptive, business models or technological capabilities. The primary direction of impact is value creation (configuration). Examples: Business model development, platform/ecosystem innovation, basic technology research & development, startup engagement, innovation intelligence.

The target portfolio including new initiatives is derived from a strategic growth gap analysis. In order to fill an identified growth gap, a company needs to start exploitation- or exploration-oriented inititatives with corresponding sizes and time horizons.

Premise 2: Board of Directors and executive management are committed to attributing equal importance to exploitation and exploration initiatives as both are vital for a company to thrive sustainably. This particularly implies receiving a long term mandate and adequate resource allocation for exploration and its initiatives. Probably the most critical requirement for explorative initiatives to flourish is staffing them with dedicated, high-quality full-time workers. Given that the vast majority of startups fail despite mobilizing dedication from a team that has nothing to lose, not dedicating adequate quality and quantity of workers will ultimately consign explorative ventures to failure. The appropriate ratio of resource allocation between exploitation and exploration depends in particular on a company’s strategy and environment, among other criteria. The CEO (in alignment with the entire board) is in charge to define this high-level ratio for the entire company.

Saul Kaplan has suggested some debunking questions to check whether – or not –  you have a company’s executive management, first and foremost the CEO, on board. Some of them are listed in the following, slightly rephrased for our context here:

• Does your CEO/executive management agree that innovation goes beyond breakthrough products to include business model innovation – entirely new ways to create, deliver, and capture value?
• Will your colleagues tell me that failure is a career-limiting move, or will they tell me that the company celebrates experimentation?
• How much time does your CEO/executive management spend strengthening and protecting the current business model, versus designing the next one?
• Does your CEO/executive management have clear and discrete objectives for both exploitative and explorative innovation? Do you organize differently for each?
• Do internal ideas and projects that threaten to cannibalize the current business model get squashed – or nurtured?
• Does your CEO/executive management have a process for allocating resources for explorative innovation projects that lies outside of the control of business units?
• Do executives with responsibility for explorative innovation report to the CEO/executive management, or to another line executive responsible for today’s business?
• Is your CEO/executive management willing to create a sandbox for exploration, even if it means carving out a part of the current business/market to serve as an ongoing real-world innovation lab?

Note: It’s mandatory to receive CEO commitment and alignment among executive management before putting systematic effort in truly explorative activities – otherwise exploration-oriented innovation will eventually be doomed, resources be wasted and people be frustrated.

Premise 3: Exploitation- and exploration-oriented initiatives are separated in terms of organizational anchoring, governance and funding. The distinct setups are proposed as follows:

• Exploitation-oriented initiatives are anchored in the operational business units. Innovation governance is carried out by a business unit’s executive management as overall responsible and a dedicated innovation board as supporting structure. Funding is covered by the annual budgeting.
• Exploration-oriented initatives are anchored in a dedicated exploration unit, headed by a “chief Explorer” who reports to the CEO – just as the business unit leaders. He is also in charge for governance, supported by a dedicated “corporate innovation board” which is staffed by innovation-related stakeholders across the entire company – in particular all business units are to be represented. Financing is covered by a corporate fund, following a staged investment approach.

This ring-fenced setup enables each of both “camps” to operate as if the company’s future depended on it alone. The operational units pursue prolonging success of their existing businesses. The exploration unit aims at identifying and scaling novel – and often disruptive – opportunities to build cutting-edge businesses. These mutually complementing purposes correspond well to distinct types of transformation efforts, recently outlined by Scott Anthony:

• Exploitation  <=> core transformation, i.e. doing what you are currently doing in a fundamentally different way
• Exploration <=> strategic transformation, i.e. changing the very essence of a company

In the end, this ambidextrous approach involves the highest impact on corporate development. Moreover, it avoids exploration to fall victim to common and dangerous organizational traits: short termism and resource prioritization in favor of core business.

Premise 4: Fostering an innovation portfolio is enabled by a proper idea management system which allows to either assign an internal or external idea to the corresponding unit or to reject it. One common mistake of organizations is to ask employees and external contributors to generate ideas without putting mechanisms in place to act upon them. Therefore, it proves crucial to develop criteria by which to judge and process ideas – particularly including the “crazy” ones. A good example of how an idea management process could look like, is given below. The original figure is slightly adapted for our context.

Adapted from: http://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/institutionalizing-innovation/

Whereas the upper path is taken by exploitation-oriented ideas with high proximity to the core business, the lower path holds for exploration-oriented ideas with no (immediate) fit with the core business. In order to feed the idea management system with potent and explorative ideas, a company needs to be based on an open, collaborative culture, leveraging a cross-pollinating and serendipity-friendly infrastructure and startup engagement.

 

Three horizons as distinct playgrounds for innovation intiatives

Exploration- and exploitation-oriented innovation initiatives can be assigned to three strategic horizons. As displayed below, the horizons address different proximities to the core business with regard to business model or technological capabilities – and therefore indirectly time scale. The horizons’ strategic objectives can be put in a nutshell:

• H1 – Core: Optimization of existing business models and technologies, addressing of existing markets
• H2 – Growth: Acceleration and scaling of new business models and technologies, adaptation of existing business models
• H3 – Future: Discovery and validation of new business models and technologies, shaping of future markets

Moreover, each horizon is based on dedicated conditions in terms of accounting, metrics, approaches and instruments, as well as organizational and personal requirements. Upcoming posts at my blog are planned to elaborate on this more in detail. In average, the ratio H1:H2:H3 for resource allocation amounts to be roughly 70:20:10. Although this might be a good rule of thumb, a company’s actually required ratio needs to be adjusted necessarily according to its individual context and environment.

Whereas H1 represents the realm of purely exploitation-oriented and H3 the domain of purely exploration-oriented innovation initiatives, H2 can be regarded as interface between both “worlds” – which makes it even more demanding. Main issues in this regard are the integration of exploitation and exploration focus as well as exchange of capabilities between business units and exploration unit for mutual benefit. Consequently, each horizon requires dedicated leadership and management in order to succeed. H1 needs a traditional style if the business environment is stable and rather predictable (e.g. automobile or food industry, public transportation), or a more adaptive style if the environment is highly dynamic and unpredictable (e.g. technology or fashion industry). H3 needs an entrepreneurial one. H2, in turn, relies on a challenging, ambidextrous style at the intersection of H1 and H3. The H2 pipeline is fed from two directions:

• Existing H1 businesses are to be adapted and extended by partially renewing the existing business model or applying new technological capabilities (Adapt).
• H3 initiatives have been validated in terms of their success potential and are supposed to be scaled up. Scaling inititiatives are intended to either end up as new H1 core businesses in case of disruptive innovation or getting integrated in an existing division in case of sustaining innovation (Scale).

Depending on the type of environment a division operates in, either direction tends to be pronounced. If the environment is highly stable and malleable (e.g. offers a potential for disruption), deliberate, and occasionally revolutionary, opportunities from H3 will eventually enter H2. In case the environment is unpredictable and difficult to shape, a more evolutionary and agile approach is indicated: innovation is primarily operationally embedded and driven out of the core business towards H2, where experimentation within the existing business is leveraged to adapt to the changing conditions. In contrast, feeding from both directions is more balanced if the environment is in between those extremes. As most H2 initiatives pose a transformational character, usually coming along with significant organizational change and pain, it’s critical to launch as few of such initiatives as possible at the same time.

 

Takeway: A suggested model for integrative innovation management

The points made above can be framed in the following model for integrative innovation management:

The model reflects some key takeaways:

• Structural separation of exploration and exploitation is crucial for established companies in oder to pursue revolutionary innovation, i.e. to create novel businesses (e.g. through white space opportunities) and disrupt existing ones, mostly operating in mature industries, respectively.
• Prolongation of established businesses is accomplished through evolutionary innovation within existing business models. It requires integration of optimization and adaptation by means of an operationally embedded, agile organizational structure.
• Appropriate integration interfaces between exploration and exploitation structures have to be designed for collaborative scaling of initiatives and mutual capability leverage.
• Pursuing both complementary directions of impact in parallel entails a balanced innovation portfolio and therefore the highest likelihood for company success over the short and long term.

So its 3 days away from the end of 2016? what a year it was! ZBIN continues to forge ahead and we give credit to the strong and active community. We are now 28,000 on Facebook where participation is restricted to a few individuals; most members prefer our Watsapp platform where active discussions go on.

We have over 5,000 members on Whatsapp who are on the following groups:

1. ZBIN Poultry (Our number one group with over a 1000 members)
2. ZBIN Baking (We have over 1000 members on this group)
3. ZBIN Transport
4. ZBIN Agriculture
5. ZBIN Online Forex Trading (Zimbabwe & South Africa)
6. ZBIN HR Resources
7. ZBIN Malawi
8. ZBIN Rabbits
9. ZBIN Real Estate
10. ZBIN Harare-General
11. ZBIN Mutare –Geneal
12. ZBIN Portuguese Groups
13. ZBIN Cape Town
14. ZBIN Mining
We hope to consolidate the groups and ensure that they are effective. We will not be adding a lot of new groups in 2017 but will ensure that the few existing groups are effective and improve in terms of operations. We are also happy to have added groups for foreigners such as ZBIN Online Forex Trading for South Africans, ZBIN Baking and HR Resources for South Africans and lastly ZBIN Malawi for Malawians. We will continue with regional expansion and look at incorporating Zambians, Namibians, Tanzanians and Ugandans.

Successes in 2016

1.Website Establishment: We did set up a website for our poultry group www.zbinchickens.co.zw in April 2016. An excellent resource centre for the marketing of poultry products in Zimbabwe. The site was unexpectedly pulled down by an unscrupulous website developer. The setback did not deter us in setting another website, the www.zbinworld.com. The performance of the website has been pleasing with over 50,000 visits in 2 months! We hope to improve on content and resources. The website is basically a filing cabinet for all of our discussions and posts. We are filing our posts so that one can easily retrieve them because business information rarely expires. In addition to being a filing cabinet, our website a free market place for our members. We are hoping to improve on the marketing aspect.

2.Forum Newsletter: A ZBIN member should stay informed with up to date business information. Business and investment information should be available on your figure tips and no cost to you-this is our motto. We have done our best to update our members through Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp and our website. We have also added a weekly newsletter that summarises all posts, trends and new information. We have 5,000 members receiving this newsletter and this is a good number. In 2017 we will be hoping to improve by introducing a ZBIN App which you can download so that our members remain ahead of the curve.

3.Business Tours: It started with my first trip to Tete in Mozambique. I showed you that its possible to go to Mozambique, I showed you that yes business opportunities exist in Mozambique. Iam glad that this helped to inspire more members to visit two additional tours coming after my initial visit. We give credit to Clara Mapfumo and team for organising fruitful tours.

4.Group Meetings: We are slowly moving from being an online community to a business movement where members meet, network, exchange business information and help partner in business. We held a total of 10 business meetings in Harare some for the Portuguese Group and ZBIN General. We are looking to improve in 2017 by covering all cities and towns including the Diaspora. There are a lot of lessons learnt from the previous meetings that we have held-your feedback is useful in planning better meetings.

5.Diaspora Engagement: A quarter of ZBIN members are from the Diaspora and this makes us proud as Zimbabwe’s number one Diaspora friendly community. We are happy that we have members from the Diaspora who are involved in various business activities such as Mining, Online Forex Trading and Poultry. A good case study is that of Mrs Shumba from UK who is running a successful poultry project at her home in Greendale…she gets valuable information on raising poultry and marketing. She is in UK but may be more knowledgeable in terms of poultry than some locals in Harare. What is more? She has a ready market for her chickens thanks to the ZBIN Poultry Group! Who says distance is a hindrance in business?

Failures

We also had failures in 2016 and some of the major failures are highlighted below:

1.Diaspora Connection: Our objective was to hold more group meetings in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Durban and Lusaka. We only had one small meeting in Cape Town and could not hold networking meetings in the rest of the other cities a planned.

2. Local Tours: We planned to have a local tour to help members in opportunity identification skils, this did not happen.

3.Online Forex Trading Fraud: We failed on due diligence and allowed a rogue online forex trader to lead our group. Blessing did not do the forum any good when he ended up creating different profiles such as Evangelist and inviting members to invest with him and failing to pay them back. We have since improved on our risk management and have come up with a policy of no one allowed to trade online forex on behalf of others. Members are only allowed to get free information and trade on their own. We hope to cover more updates on Risk and Fraud on a regular basis.

What to expect in 2017

1.Registration of ZBIN as a company/trust
2.Partnerships between Locals and Diaspora
3.Fund raising for members so that ZBIN can provide collateral for members bank loan applications
4.Better Marketing for members products especially the ZBIN Poultry and ZBIN Rabbits
5.Exports drive
6.More business tours to other areas such as Tanzania and Angola
7.Mentorship/Capacity Building Programmes
8.Registration of individual ZBIN groups such as companies-Poultry, Mining and Rabbit
9.Scholarships for members
10.Field days for the forum
11.ZBIN Gauteng Indaba
12.Improved website
13.ZBIN Apps.
14.More innovation and top quality researches

*We are currently developing a Balanced Score Card for Performance Measurement of the forum and will share in the coming weeks.

Good morning to the ZBIN community we hope you enjoyed the recent holidays and that all was peaceful and safe. So yesterday I got a copy of one of my favourite Sunday newspaper, The Sunday Mail, I failed to get a copy of The Standard. I usually read the two  to get balanced coverage of what is happening in Zimbabwe.

Now in The Sunday Mail is an advert of residential and commercial stands for sale in the fast growing town of Rusape. Now reading the advert there is a lot of stuff missing such as:

• No Email Address
• No Phone Number
• No website Address
• No Photos of the residential stands
• No Map of the residential stands

You see, this Town Council is doing business the old way. They have always placed adverts this way and this has worked, they have been doing this since time immemorial and it has produced results. When Council opens business tomorrow the first thing that they will do is to ask whether the advert appeared in The Sunday Mail and if confirmed then its back to normal council business. All is fine-job well done to the person who placed the advert and the Finance person who processed payment for the advert.

Now analysing the advert it seems there is room for improvement for the council. I have done an internet search of the website for Rusape Town Council and there is none. I have checked on Twitter and Facebook  again the answer is negative.

IT Strategy for Competitive Advantage

The fact that this important town council does not have a website and a presence on social media is not surprising-the issue of websites and social media is not top priority for many councils and even top companies in the private sector. There is often resistance to new ways of doing things especially in rural and urban councils. Most are afraid of losing control or imaginary risks that are posed by new ways of doing business.

Taking the example of Rusape Town Council, they need to have an IT Strategy in place supported by all councillors and relevant stakeholders. An IT strategy that defines the vision, the operation, key benefits and risk mitigation. They need a strategy that helps in the management of the town operations, a strategy that covers website management and provides a framework for IT operations. I would like to believe that they already have one in place but cold be gathering dust within council offices?

Target Market of their advert

Looking at their advert one gets the impression that their target market is local Zimbabweans since the advert is in hard copy form. There is no consideration for people who may miss the advert. There is no consideration of an important population sector-The Diaspora! The town bosses probably do not appreciate the importance of this constituency which is non resident. How is someone resident in Australia, Canada, Mozambique, South Africa or Botswana going to see the advert? Do they have access to the hard copy advert? Even someone in the rural areas such as Dewedzo or Tandi, how is this person going to access this information of residential stands for sale?

Our researches have shown that real estate matters are high on the agenda of Zimbabweans-locals and the Diaspora. Every real estate post on ZBIN attracts more than a hundred viewers within 12 hours. Our ZBIN Real Estate Group has some of the most active members, Zimbabweans from across the world inquiring everyday about the availability of residential stands, residential stand prices, real estate by laws and resources. A good number of Diasporans are interested in buying residential stands and they would like to do the transactions directly without sending any relative to inquire. They would like to contact the City Council directly either through the phone or by sending an email. They would like to see the stands for sale on a website, they would like to see the map of the residential stands, they would like to see videos so that they can be convinced that the stands are real. This information should be available real time for free!

Rusape Town Council and other councils across Zimbabwe do not know what they are missing-Potential Revenue running into millions of dollars. They are not reaching out to this community which has high interest in their services, they don’t know the high opportunity cost of doing this. Some could be struggling to sell residential stands resulting in poor service delivery, some could be failing to access crucial council operation water treatment chemicals and yet out there kune varikuda kutenga ma stands vasina adequate information?

Website as an Investment

The advantages of having a website are plenty, a good platform to showcase Rusape! Investment potential of this wonderful town. A good platform for the town clerk to communicate his vision with the residents of this town. The town council can even save a lot of resources in terms of adverts, no need to place or reduce the number of adverts in newspapers and use their website. In the case of the residential stands-they can place adverts, link the adverts to a YouTube video so that anyone interested in buying can actually see on the place where the stands are being sold. They are also selling commercial stands for filling stations and one would be interested in seeing whether the place is strategic in terms of business-is it near the Harare-Mutare highway? Is it near other Service Stations etc

Donate to Us Function: On the website the council can even put a Donate to Us function so that folks interested in the town can contribute, folks who have a connection with the town can assist in various council projects.

The council can even place adverts from the Rusape Business community and help raise more funds for operations. One of the  hindrances to the establishment of a website could be lack of information on costs. How much does it take to have a well run website? The answer is that they need less than $1,000 for set up a professional website that will help in attracting investment to the council. Money used can be recouped in first 3 months of operations in adverts. They may not even need to put council funds in the development and maintenance of the website-they need to engage the business sector in Rusape who may not have a problem in a site that will help boost investment and their business.

So food for thought to all Rusape residents and the Ministry of Local Government. Look at having IT Strategies as a competitive advantage, lets have websites up and running for every rural or urban council. These councils do not even need money to set the websites -the business community can do it for them.

Lets consider the Diaspora in all council matters because using they are a key stakeholder. Some of them have access to credit facilities where they are based.

NB* ZBIN is offering free services in the design of a world class website for Rusape Town Council and any 3 Rural Councils in Zimbabwe. We will create, help in maintenance and also promote so that the model can be used by other councils across the nation.

We are also advocating for the Ministry of Local Government to create one central website that will initially help in the marketing of residential and commercial stands.

Case Studies of top council websites:

City of London:www.cityoflondon.gov.uk

City of Johannesburg:www.joburg.org.za

City of Cape Town:http:www.capetown.gov.za

City of Ndola: http:www.cityofndola.gov.zm

City of New York: http:www1.nyc.gov

Rusape, Chiredzi, Bindura, Zibagwe or any council can get websites that are better than the above and they do not need a lot of resources for that-all they need is Innovation!

Here is the advert that appeared in the Sunday Mail 12/26/2016

SALE OF RESIDENTIAL AND INSTITUITIONAL STANDS

Notice is hereby given in terms of section 152 of the Urban Councils Act (Chapter 29:15) that Rusape Town Council is selling the following stands listed below:

Tsanzaguru Township Residential Stands(High Density) : Stands averaging 300 sqm

Tsanzaguru Township Instituitional Stands : Stands averaging 2000 sqm

Conditions of Sale

Stands shall be sold on first come first serve basis

First preference is given to those on the waiting list

Those interested are requested to visit the Department of Housing, Health and Community Services during working hours

Rusape Town Council

PO Box 17, 398 Manda Avenue

Rusape

J Maligwa

Town Clerk

We have found a video on Immigration to Australia- a detailed video with all key information you may need, hope this helps members.

So we are coming to the end of year and this period is planning period for the group. One area we are looking at is what have we achieved? We are beginning to look closely at the results versus what we had planned. The successes and the failures and lessons learnt and what needs to be corrected in 2017.

One group we would like to analyse is ZBIN Poultry Group Number 4. This is our best performing group. A lot of information has been shared, business has been generated for members, a lot of resources have been produced and shared. The icing on the cake was the setting up of the poultry website unfortunately the existence of the website was short-lived as the website was pulled down by unscrupulous website developers.

Current major Challenges

1. Marketing: Most members are still encountering problems when marketing their chickens leading to excess stock of chickens and other poultry products
2. High cost of production: The industry is being negatively affected  by high costs of production leading to little profit margins
3. No exports: Few Zim farmers are producing chickens with the export in mind
4. Lack of one voice: Looks like there is no one effective voice that speaks about Poultry in Zimbabwe. One voice that advocates for favourable policies and terms.
5. Lack of Information: With the Economy facing challenges, this sector is encountering the highest number of new entrants. The new entrants have no one place to access information for free or at little cost and this is resulting in hefty losses for most new entrants.

Proposed Solutions

We believe that the 5 problems mentioned above can be partly solved by having a registered trust or company for the group. A ZBIN company made up of the 256 members of the group should be able to have one voice that engages the private sector and other formal bodies in the marketing of our chickens. One group approaching retailers with branded chickens should result in us solving the market issues.

Members operating under one banner should unlock value in terms of economies of scale in production, marketing and promotion. One central place with all resources available should drastically reduce mortality and losses being encountered by members.

So far information is available in a haphazard manner with some of it outdated such that it serves no purpose to our members. Most of the information shared on Watsapp is not saved anywhere for future reference by members. So we are looking at redesigning our website so that we can have a Poultry section where members have access to up to date resources.

Munemo is not looking at heading this company, I have little experience on chicken rearing, we are looking at the active members of the group to come together and elect leadership that will drive the formal body to be established. Iam looking forward to the facilitation of the registration process, we will help you in terms fundraising for an administrator of the company or trust.

Conclusion

So there you are ZBIN Group Number 4, our flagship, our best ZBIN forum we need to move forward and solve the problems we are facing. Our number 1 problem being Market and we believe that by working together as a group we will achieve more. By having one voice that speaks about Poultry Issues in Zimbabwe, we will unlock more opportunities. Marketing Challenges must fall in 2017. More updates on the way forward to be shared on a bi-weekly basis.

Successful people solve problems.  Look at any great fortune, whether it be Carnegie, Ford or Gates and you find that the source of their vast accomplishment was a problem solved.  Even more prosaic executives spend most of their time solving one problem or another, with greater or lesser skill.

The contrast in outcomes can be attributed to the scale and difficulty of the problems they tackled.  All too often, we get so mired down in day-to-day challenges that the bigger issues fall by the wayside, being left for another day which never seems to come.  That, in the final analysis, is the difference between the mundane and the sublime.

So we should pay special attention to those whose ideas had impact far beyond their own lifespan.  It is they who were able to see not only the problems of their day but ones that, although they seemed minor or trivial at the time, would become consequential—even determinant—in years to come.  Here are four such men and what we can learn from them.

Vannevar Bush and the Emerging Frontier of Science

By any measure, Vannevar Bush was a man of immense accomplishment.  A professor at MIT who invented one of the first working computers, he also co-founded Raytheon, a $30 billion dollar company that prospers to this day.

Yet even these outsized achievements pale in comparison to how Bush fundamentally changed the relationship of science to greater society.  In the late 1930’s, as the winds of war began to stir in Europe, Bush saw that the coming conflict would not be won by bullets and bombs alone.  Science, he saw, would likely tip the balance between victory and defeat.

It was that insight which led to the establishment of Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD).  With Bush at its helm, the agency led the development of the proximity fuze, guided missiles, radar, more advanced battlefield medicine and, not least of all, the Manhattan Project which led to the atomic bomb.

As the war came to a close, President Roosevelt asked Bush to write a report on how the success of the OSRD could be replicated in peacetime.  That report, Science: The Endless Frontier, outlined a new vision of the relationship between public and private investment, with government expanding scientific horizons and industry developing new applications.

He wrote:

Basic research leads to new knowledge. It provides scientific capital. It creates the fund from which the practical applications of knowledge must be drawn. New products and new processes do not appear full-grown. They are founded on new principles and new conceptions, which in turn are painstakingly developed by research in the purest realms of science

Bush’s report led to the foundation of the NSF, NIH, DARPA and other agencies, which have funded early research in everything from the Internet and GPS, to the Human Genome Project and many of our most important cures.  It has been Bush’s vision, perhaps more than almost anything else, that has made America an exceptional nation.

Oh, and he also wrote an essay in 1945 that not only laid out what would become the Internet, but influenced many of the key pioneers who designed it.

Marshall McLuhan and the Global Village

Where Vannevar Bush saw the transformative potential of science, Marshall McLuhan was one of the first to see the subtle, but undeniable influence of popular culture.  While many at the time thought of mass media as merely the flotsam and jetsam of the modern age, he saw that the study of things like newspapers, radio and TV could yield important insights.

Central to his ideas about culture was his concept of media as “extensions of man.”  Following this line of thought, he argued that Gutenberg’s printing press not only played a role in spreading information but also in shaping human thought. Essentially, the medium is the message.  Interestingly, these ideas led him to very much the same place as Bush.

As he wrote in 1962*, nearly 30 years before the invention of the World Wide Web:

The next medium, whatever it is—it may be the extension of consciousness—will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form. A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individual’s encyclopedic function and flip into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind.

McLuhan argued further that the new age of electronic media would disrupt the private experience and specialization that the dominance of printed media brought about and usher in a new era of collective, transnational experience that he called the global village.  Anybody who watches global news networks or surfs the Web can see what he meant.

Importantly, however, he did not see the global village as a peaceful place.  Rather than promoting widespread harmony and understanding, he predicted that the ability to share experiences across vast chasms of time and space would lead to a new form of tribalism, a result in a “release of human power and aggressive violence” greater than ever in history.

It has become all too clear what he meant by that as well.

Richard Feynman Sees “Plenty of Room at the Bottom”

When Richard Feynman stepped up to the podium to address the American Physical Society in 1959, he had already gained a reputation as both an accomplished scientist and an iconoclast (during his tenure at the the Manhattan project, he became famous for his safecracking and other pranks).

His talk, modestly titled There’s Plenty of Room At The Bottom would launch a revolution in physics and engineering that continues to play out to this day.  Starting from a seemingly innocent question about shrinking an encyclopedia down to the size of a postage stamp, he proceeded over the next hour to invent the new field of nanotechnology.

The talk, which is surprisingly easy and fun to read, also gives a fascinating window into how a genius thinks.  After pondering the problem of shrinking things down to the size of molecules, he proposes some solutions, then thinks some more about what issues those ideas would create, proposes some more fixes and on and on until a full picture emerged.

One of the most astounding things about Feynman is that his creation of nanotechnology was not a one-off, but part of a larger trend.  He was also a pioneer in parallel computing and did important work in virology.  All of this in addition to his day job as a physicist, for which he won the Nobel prize in 1965.

Tim Berners-Lee Creates a Web of Data

Tim Berners-Lee is most famous for his creation of the World Wide Web.  In November 1989, he created the three protocols—HTTP, URL, and HTML—that we now know as the “Web” and released his creation to the world, refusing to patent it.  Later, he helped set up the W3C consortium that continues to govern and manage its growth and further development.

The truth is, however, that the Web wasn’t a product of any great vision, but rather a solution to a particular problem that he encountered at CERN.  Physicists would come there from all over the world, work for a period of time and then leave.  Unfortunately, they recorded their work in a labyrinth of different platforms and protocols that didn’t work well together.

So Berners-Lee set out to solve that problem by creating a universal medium that could link information together.  He never dreamed it would grow into what it did.  If he had, he would have built it differently.  He wrote at length about these frustrations in his memoir, Weaving The Web.  Chief among them was the fact that while the Web-connected people, it did little for data.

So he envisioned a second web, which he called the Semantic Web.  Much like his earlier creation, the idea outstripped even what he imagined for it.  New protocols, such as Hadoop and Spark, have made data central to how today’s technology functions.  Increasingly, we’re living in a semantic economy, where information knows no bounds and everything connects.

The Best Way to Predict the Future is to Create it

Take a hard look at these four visionaries and some common themes emerge.  First, all except McLuhan took an active role in bringing their ideas into realities.  Bush played a central role in implementing the scientific architecture he designed.  Feynman offered prizes for people who could make things at nanoscale and Berners-Lee continues to take an active role at W3C.

Another commonality is that, while their ideas didn’t meet with immediate acceptance, they stuck with them.  McLuhan’s ideas made him an outcast for much of his career until he became an international celebrity in his fifties.  Berners-Lee created the Web partly out of frustration after the hypertext community wouldn’t pursue it.  Bush and Feynman met less resistance but were already prominent in their fields.

Probably most importantly, none of them were following trends.  Rather, they set out to uncover fundamental forces.  It was that quest for basic understanding that led them to ask questions and find answers that nobody else could imagine at the time.  They weren’t just looking to solve the problems of their day but sought out problems that transcended time.

In effect, they were able to see the future because they cared about it.  Their motivation wasn’t to beat the market, impress a client or attract funding for a startup, but to understand more about how the universe functions and what could be made possible.  In doing so, they helped us see it too so that we could also join in and make the world a better place.

by Jeffrey Phillips

 

We tend to be very short-sighted, we corporate executives. Our lifespans are relatively brief, all things considered. There are over 240 years since the founding of the United States, and using a 20-year cycle for generations that suggest approximately 12 generations of people during that brief window.

Most of us work for approximately 40 years, but we rarely consider the events or recent history before we started working.

In fact, there’s very little rationale to think about history in many cases, except for some hoary old stories about the founding of a company and its emergent culture. Most of our waking, productive time is focused on the now, the current quarter, the next quarter, because that’s what we are evaluated on, compensated for. There’s little time to worry about what might happen in the future and even less time to worry about what happened in the recent past.

It’s this lack of context and historical appreciation that makes innovation so interesting because our short-term focus convinces us that the way things are right now is a permanent condition when in reality it’s a fleeting experience that will change again shortly.

A brief innovation history lesson of the US

From its founding in the early 17th century until well after the US Civil War, the vast majority of people lived in small, rural settlements. Many of the people who lived in that period grew the food they ate, raised the beef or chicken they consumed and had little financial resources. Very few companies existed and most “innovation” was in the realm of transportation – primarily moving goods and/or people on waterways (canals, steamships) or rail. Other than the military and the emerging railroad business, there were few large organizations and even fewer models for how to build and manage a business.

After the Civil War and up to the Great Depression there was a significant flowering of major industries, building on the transportation infrastructure built earlier and on the idea of mass production. Oil, steel, railroads and other monopolies emerged, and banking and financial services grew alongside these emerging industries. Yet still the vast majority of people lived hand to mouth in rural settings. Innovation in these days was often focused on communication – Marconi, the “wireless”, radio and other devices reduced the distances and built common stories for the American public.

World War Two changed everything. Washington DC, formerly a very small, sleepy city, grew dramatically during the war, and the federal government grew in importance. As we entered the Cold War, the growth that the World War created was sustained by fears of Russia and a new emerging Cold war. Innovation during this time was focused on technology – especially weaponry. The nuclear bomb, the ability to deliver weapons at a distance, the space race.

The 1960s through the 1990s were boom years (discounting the Oil embargo) mostly due to dividends we reaped from the investments in technology and the space race. The US emerged as the sole large economy undamaged by the Second World War and grew to dominate its allies. The space race with Russia and military investments created a range of new technologies that were quickly converted into consumer technologies. Innovation during this period was found in consumer goods, especially electronics and technology, along with software – much of it spawned by previous government research and investment. DARPANET became the basis for the internet. Transistors and electronics research fueled the rise of handheld devices.

The 2000s and onward are less about product innovation and more about business model innovation and financial engineering. Increasingly the US is becoming a high-cost country in terms of labor and manufacturing, and outsourcing jobs to less costly locations. We are focused on changing the terms of compensation and payment for services (Google funded by ads rather than licenses) and financial engineering in banking, financial services, and other industries. GM for a long time was profitable not because it built cars but because it financed them.

Up until the 1880’s, the vast majority of people were farmers, mechanics, craftsmen. They worked with their hands, with deep, innate knowledge about their services and skills. This model changed as Henry Ford and others created the mass production line, which has in many cases reached its logical conclusion, at least as far as human workers on the line are concerned. We retain many of the measures and metrics of an agrarian economy – taking vacations in the summer, planning and budgeting around an annual cycle, reporting on a quarterly basis – that have no real meaning in today’s knowledge-based economy that competes on a global basis.

What emerges about innovation from this review of history?

1. In the past, a lot of innovation was driven by the most important impediment or challenge in a specific timeframe: transportation of goods and people in the colonial era, banking and communications during the dawn of larger enterprises, communication technologies as the country grew, defense and technology as the country fought and was threatened with a cold war, business models and financial engineering as the technology investment petered out.
2. Innovation comes in waves and as one wave is peaking, another wave is just starting to emerge.Innovations take time to proliferate but almost always proliferate faster than we might expect.
3. There is a cyclical, repetitive nature to innovation, which we ignore at our peril. Take for example the nature of retail. Sears grew because it had a huge selection and could deliver goods anywhere. The Sears catalog is an analog to today’s Amazon website. Sears modified its business model to move toward a physical retailing model as the US expanded and as people moved to the suburbs and seems to have forgotten its mass, virtual retailer roots. Today, Amazon and other virtual retailers dominate, but we can imagine a future where hyperlocal retailers blending virtual and physical stores and delivery emerge.
4. Business models and business conditions are temporary. The concept of mass production is an idea that may be relevant to exactly one century – the 20th century – for the US. The fact that mass production worked then, in those conditions, does not mean that it should and must continue to work as an operative model now because many conditions have changed. The internet and e-commerce make it much more possible for individuals to be craftsmen (Etsy for example) or self-employed (Uber, AirBnB), which is simply a return to an earlier model, with much more technology underpinning.
5. Technology introduces change, customers and innovators change technologies into solutions that change the market. Technologies change but unless they can be harnessed and adapted to create benefits and solutions that customers need and want, they aren’t meaningful. The transistor by itself is interesting, a smaller, cheaper portable radio provides a huge benefit to consumers. We innovators fall in love with technology but fail to understand that it is the customer need and benefit that is paramount.
6. Much innovation in one era is built on the investments of a previous era. Mass production isn’t all that useful unless there is a good transportation infrastructure, as an example. The dot-com boom was based on research and technologies that were sparked during the Cold War. Currently, those technologies are reaching end of life, and we see far more innovation in services, business models and customer experiences than in technologies, and far more financial engineering than is probably good for the economy. This is because we haven’t had a real flourishing of either new technologies, new infrastructure or a real competitive threat like the Soviet space race. In other words, we’ve coasted for the past 20 years, harvesting previous investments without laying a foundation that future generations can build on unless they want to bet on sub-prime mortgages.
7. A lot of innovation was created by those outside the status quo – new immigrants (Andrew Carnegie as an example) or those outside the establishment, typically on the frontiers, who sought to solve problems faced by the emerging population, while the establishment was relatively comfortable. The median age of the US was relatively low, and few people lived into old age.

What can we predict about innovation in the near future based on the past?

1. We should be on the cusp of some significant new emerging innovation, but for the life of me I can’t figure out what that is. It could be a continuing evolution of business models and customer experiences. We lack a real compelling burning platform like the Soviet Space race and are more distracted and less unified than in previous generations. Also, corporations spend less on R&D than in the past and the government is spending less on a percentage basis on technology and R&D. This means that future innovation is less likely to be technology driven and more focused on experiences, services and hopefully business models.
2. The older command and control hierarchies and mass production thinking may give way to new organizational models, new governance and new ways of building companies. As we move from an agrarian calendar and mass production models, new business models, relationships and organization models will emerge and may drive new innovation in organizational structures and customer relationships.
3. The individual or small business becomes as important to the economy as large corporations. More people can work as craftsmen or knowledge workers on their own, leveraging virtual workspace technologies and the increasing value of knowledge work. Larger business increasingly wants to outsource work to find the best value for their money, retaining only the mission-critical or activities that reflect competitive advantage. The infrastructure in terms of software and ancillary services exists to support a larger workforce of independent contractors and small businesses.
4.  Past innovations were often launched by public works or investments by the government. Transportation was either privately financed by large groups or by the government. Defense, aerospace, and technology were funded in response to the Cold War. Future innovations will emerge from customer needs and those that can aggregate them quickly, and less from technologies or challenges identified by the government. Indeed the government is becoming a consumer of commercial innovations rather than a springboard for future innovation, with the possible exception of healthcare, aging and green technologies. This means a more distributed and diversified innovation future, less focused on one large population or government challenge and more competition over standards and protocols.
5. Immigration, like it or not, will play an important role in future innovation. The resident population is aging, and less likely to be as active innovating and solving problems because of the wealth transfer to older populations through retirement savings and health care transfers. More innovation is likely to come from immigrants who refresh the population at the lower end of the age scale, who face more challenges and difficulties than some of the native born population. Aging populations by definition are less innovative, so to refresh the innovation spirit and energy we need to recruit immigrants who can create compelling new innovations. As the country ages, and boomers retire, there will be far more emphasis on innovation in terms of products and services for the boomers, who are used to having their own way and will demand far better products and services than their parents did when they retired.
6. The pace and nature of innovation will accelerate as more people in more places become part of the global economy and more consumers achieve middle-class status for the first time. There are far more competitors in far more regions and geographies, which means more competition. However, there are far more people entering the middle class who have buying power and will want new products and services. This means, though, that innovations must be conceived for global consumers, as the markets for new innovations will be in many more markets than just the US. Our understanding of the needs and expectations of the US-based customer is poor; our understanding of needs and expectations of newly emerging customers in other countries is virtually non-existent. We need to move faster, with greater urgency, to create innovations that meet global needs, not just US needs.

Those who don’t study the past are doomed to repeat it

I began this post commenting on the lifecycle of the average manager, and how narrow their time focus is. While we live out our work lives over 40 years we do so in 90-day increments, often failing to appreciate how repetitive and cyclical business and innovation are. The more we understand about how innovation has unfolded in the past, the more we are likely to be able to predict how innovation will emerge in the future. There are two great quotes that are relevant here.

The first is Spinoza’s quote: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. And we do, quite often, repeat the experience and mistakes of the past.

The second is Faulkner’s: The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

We can learn from the past about how innovation unfolds, and use that insight to determine how innovation is likely to emerge, and what the key drivers will be. Doing so makes us smarter and more prepared to engage innovation as it occurs, and to use those innovation drivers to our benefit.

Some years back when I wanted to build my first home a good friend of mine Wilfred gave me good advice. He said when building your first home don’t go for fancy stuff, don’t go for big house plans which you may end up struggling to complete.

He said your first project should be simple and yet classy-your chief aim being to stop paying anyone rent! Once your starter home is complete then start strategizing for a bigger project where you will use experience gained from the starter home. You have to keep moving and therefore improve in terms of number of rooms, number of features-perhaps a bigger bathroom, more bedrooms, swimming pools,tennis courts etc.

He said look at the white community in Zim especially Harare, most of them started by living in areas such as Haig Park,Hillside,Waterfalls, Mabelreign, Sentosa, Greencroft. Most of these areas had starter homes for the white community and most of the homes were basic…a few bedrooms,bathroom,kitchen,dining and lounge etc. With time the white community moved to bigger places such as Mt Pleasant,Highlands,Glenlorne,Vainona and Borrowdale.

So you too can do it, start small and keep moving. A home in Kuwadzana, you sell it and buy a residential stand in Tynwald, you build and sell and move on to Glen Lorne or Chishawasha. The trick here is to be mobile-you have to keep moving. Do not look down upon an area like what some say when talking about high density areas, just grab a property improve, sell and keep moving.

Starter home versus Massive Projects

I urge you to visit some new developments in Harare- drive along Harare Drive where you can see incomplete housing projects. Some would have skipped the housing stages and instead of starter homes, you just move straight to Mt Pleasant, Glen Lorne or Borrowdale. The problem with being too ambitious is that sometimes you can build massive homes that you do not complete resulting in you selling the incomplete houses. Harare has a lot of such projects and I have copied below a couple of such projects. The problem with selling incomplete projects is that you end up selling at a discount!