An integrated network of personal devices.

The smartphone continues to experience explosive growth.  For most people, it is the center of their digital universe and their primary window into personal streams of data, information and content.  Because the smartphone is always on their person and its computational capabilities continue to improve, it will continue to be the center of people’s ecosystem of devices for the foreseeable future.

Today, the smartphone is a multi-functional device that handles email, internet, phone, games and much more.  It also connects and displays information from other devices and services, everything from tablet browser tabs to Netflix movie queues.  New types of mobile products and services will soon come to market that will connect and enhance everything from cars to EKG readers, smart watches to smart glasses and fundamentally change our mobile experience.

This interlinked ecosystem of intelligent products and services will be characterized by connectivity, distributed computational power, and machine learning. Technological developments in networked computing, big data, and machine learning, along with cheaper sensors and more powerful devices make it possible.  Computational power that lives in the cloud will distributed across millions of devices. New sensors embedded in these devices will capture new types of data. Then improvements in data science and machine learning will perform analysis to create mobile experiences that are highly tailored to individuals according to their immediate context and preferences.

A mobile experience that is adaptive, predictive, and responsive.

These new technological developments allow products and services that feel uniquely tailored to individual needs  Providing that device manufacturers and service providers do the hard work of understand how to create new solutions from these technologies that actually serve and benefits the lives of their customers.  The opportunity lies in leveraging mobile experiences that have the following characteristics.

Adaptive

Adaptive services display information and present functionality according to a person’s preferences.   They have the ability to analyze time, location, social setting, and activity to only show what’s necessary and desired.  Adaptive services learn about people’s activities, preference and behaviors and then change accordingly.  They also grow as new technologies and data sources become available. This means a product or system doesn’t become obsolete as soon as a new technology is released. This is especially important for products that leverage data, because mobile changes so quickly.

Predictive

Data has more value if it is contextually intelligent.  This means delivering the right information, at the right time, and in the right way. Doing so requires the service to analyze and learn people’s activities, preferences and needs.  It then estimates what type of information will be needed, when to deliver it, and how to present that information. Predictive services feel magical because they always seem perfectly in sync with people’s lives.

Responsive

Not everyone is willing or interested in buying an entire ecosystem, so it is crucial to ensure that even when a product is purchased as a standalone unit it still creates value for the consumer.  Multiple products can then build upon that experience to create a synergistic effect where one plus one suddenly equals three.  It’s imperative to create services and display information that responds to the device being used at the time, whether it’s a smart watch, smartphone, or console display in a car.

By Alonzo Canada

The Next Wave of Mobile is a post from: Jump Associates

Big Data is changing business operations, health, and marketing. But its potential on the lives of everyday people could be even greater.

An explosion of data is fueling major innovations across sectors. Big Data is the biggest idea in technology at the moment. With the proliferation of the Internet, especially to mobile devices, an unprecedented amount of new data about all aspects of life is being generated. Every single day, at least 2.5 exabytes of new information is created. And there’s a big payoff for companies that know how to use it.

There have been notable Big Data successes. But we’re just scratching the surface.

Major enterprise tech players like Oracle, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, and HP are making huge investments in Big Data, offering to build customized analysis platforms for large business customers that will help them better serve customer needs, provide superior recommendations, and detect problems earlier. One thing is certain – more is possible.

Harnessing Big Data to benefit consumers is a huge opportunity in mobile.

Today’s consumer applications of Big Data are, offering social filtering to create recommendation. Smartphones are filled with sensors that create data that can be used to further benefit the user. Mobile device makers have a major opportunity to own this area.

The mobile opportunity in Big Data is to create a portfolio of services that contribute to a shared data pool and continually improve one another’s performance.

Big Data’s initial use cases have targeted the enterprise, marketing opportunities, and scientific breakthroughs. Much more is possible. Truly personal experiences are just beginning to be identified.  Services like Google Now suggest how mobile services can be truly contextual through big data analytics and inference. Targeting different aspects of people’s live such parenting, relationships, personalized health, career guidance, or self-improvement to only name a few are where the real power of big data and mobile lie.  This will help create truly intelligent and personal mobile experiences.

Big Data will be significant in mobile because it can help to enable contextual computing.

As smartphone and social networking adoption have accelerated around the globe, the use cases for both technologies have similarly expanded. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Even as data like social connections and user location have already enabled new types of connected apps and experiences, the combination of new types of data across people’s lives set the table for a bigger shift: contextual computing.

The intersection of big data and mobile will create a new paradigm of digital experiences that match the uniqueness of people’s lives.

In this new paradigm, devices, services, and software will alter themselves based on real-time data and prediction engines to reflect a user’s current needs. Though highly personalized, these remarkable experiences can only be enabled through sophisticated use of Big Data capability. The future of the mobile market, in many ways, will be a race to accumulate both the most data about users and the most clever experiences that can be enabled by accumulating ever more granular and massive data sets. At some point, devices become a mere window to services.

The opportunity in big data and mobile will be won by firms that are strong in both hardware and software.

As we increasingly move away from the PC toward the smartphone as the primary interface to the Internet, it becomes increasingly important to pay attention to what’s happening off the screen. Big Data is one means toward that. But some aspects of people’s lives are hard to measure.  Mobile device makers have a unique play in big data.  They have the ability to capture data to measure other aspects of people’s lives.  Looking to people’s unmet needs and leverage new capabilities in sensors, connectivity, data capture and analysis will allow the most innovative mobile device makers to create new paradigms in mobile that are big new growth opportunities.

By Alonzo Canada

Big Data will create new paradigms in mobile experiences. is a post from: Jump Associates

April is fast approaching – and we’re excited to host the upcoming New Business Boot Camp. We’re five weeks away from Boot Camp, and one week away from the close of early registration, on Tuesday, March 26^th.

The boot camp defines a simple, straightforward process for new business creation: Empathy, creativity and execution. Empathy helps us identify unmet needs and new business opportunities. Creativity introduces ways to come up with new solutions. And execution provides tools to turn ideas into ready-to-pitch business concepts.

One framework we’ll introduce is a key component of business concepts: The revenue model. Professor Andy Hargadon at UC-Davis has identified eight different revenue models, and in the article “Want to Upend An Entire Industry? Change it’s Revenue Stream” written by Jump’s Ryan Baum he talks about how we consider revenue models in our work. Companies may adopt any one or combination to make money, but ultimately, they boil down to these eight:

1. Unit sales: Sell a product or service to customers. GE uses this method when they sell microwaves.

2.  Advertising fees: Sell others the opportunities to distribute their message on your space. Google uses this method with its search product.

3. Franchise fees: Sell the right for someone else to invest in, grow, and manage a version of your business. McDonald’s uses this method with its stores that are independently owned and operated as franchises.

4. Utility fees: Sell goods and services on a per-use or as-consumed basis. Most electric companies use this model when they charge customers only for the electricity they use.

5. Subscription fees: Charge a fixed price for access to services for a set period of time. Gold’s Gym charges a monthly or yearly subscription fee for people to access their gym.

6. Transaction fees: Charge a fee for referring, enabling, or executing a transaction between parties. Visa charges a transaction fee to retailers each time a customer purchases a product in their store.

7. Professional fees: Provide professional services on a time-and-materials contract. H&R Block makes money by charging customers for the time it takes to prepare their taxes.

8. License fees: Sell the rights to use intellectual property. Every time a customer buys a T-shirt or a hat with the logo of their favorite sports team on it, that team makes money from license fees.

In Boot Camp, we’ll apply these different revenue models to the ideas we generate. Much like how subscriptions turned movie rentals from a Blockbuster to a Netflix, a lesson quickly becomes evident: Changing the revenue model has the potential to change the entire idea. We’re always excited to see the many ideas folks come up with during Boot Camp. But most of all, we’re eager to see what new business concepts participants create.

To learn more, visit the Jump New Business Boot Camp page. To register for yourself or your team, visit our registration page. If you’re already planning to join, register on or before Tuesday, March 26^th to take advantage of reduced rates. Registration fees will return to full price starting Wednesday, March 27^th. We’re almost full too! In case you miss April’s Boot Camp we’ll be hosting a second one this Fall. This time or next, we’ll see you soon!

By Annie Chang

Catch Early Registration for Jump’s New Business Boot Camp is a post from: Jump Associates

For 15 years, Jump has worked with leaders and change agents in fields as diverse as healthcare, financial services, retail, CPG, technology, and non-profits to identify and grow new businesses.

Over time, we’ve found that the best way to infuse a culture of innovation is to learn by doing. As a result we’ve developed a full-day boot camp that takes our clients through a series of trainings, action learnings, and project work that lead to compelling new business ideas. Some participants, only half-jokingly, want to take their ideas immediately to market, as you can read in the NY Times article on our boot camps.

Once only available to client teams of 30, we are now offering our New Business Boot Camp as an open enrollment event to small teams and individuals.

Our next boot camp will be in New York April 25-26, 2013. To learn more, visit the Jump New Business Boot Camp page. To register for yourself or your team, visit our registration page. Please keep in mind, space is limited. We hope to see you soon.

Jump’s New Business Boot Camp Now Open For All is a post from: Jump Associates

As a recent transplant to New York, I found the number of events offered around the city to be overwhelming. Each event had its own, unique promise of connecting me to interesting people. Yet after attending numerous happy hours and panel lectures, I found myself feeling quite drained and alone.

About 6 months into my time in NY a friend from Philadelphia invited me to an event he promised would be different.

Wok+Wine, effectively dubbed “the world’s most delicious social network,” recently hosted its 100th event and has been spreading across the world like wildfire. Their premise is fairly simple: 40 people share 40 bottles of wine and 40 pounds of head-on, freshly cooked shrimp. The food is cooked in front of everyone and eaten around a massive, banana leaf covered table.

The principles the event don’t allow much room for modesty as everyone is decapitating shrimp and sopping up delicious broth. But what you come to realize is how this leads to less talk about business and more talk about personal interests. With topics ranging from architecture to new technology to side projects and traveling, it’s truly unpredictable what might come up. With hands covered in olive oil and cilantro, any fear one had of entering a new conversation coming in has dripped away.

Wok+Wine was created on the premise that there are amazing people all around us, we just need the right environment to help us escape our own little worlds and meet them.

This attitude is quite similar to Jump’s approach to strategy, as we take a creative and often unconventional approach to solving the difficult questions companies have surrounding how to grow in times of change.

In our work with Fortune 500 companies, we too often see decisions being made purely on what exists in the company’s immediate industry. The best strategy is one that starts with the question, “What’s the future we want to create?” rather than basing a strategic plan on what exists today. Basing decisions about business growth on what currently exists is rather similar to trying to meet new people by spending more time with your current network. You are limiting yourself to the views and opinions of your current circles.

In a similar way that Wok+Wine has created a fun and easy way for folks to meet new people and make new friends, we’ve found that creating the right opportunity for businesses to gain exposure to customer needs and trends and ideas outside of their industry not only expands their perspectives, it also leads to better strategies.

The truth is that the answers to the challenges facing so many companies today are all around us. We often just need to help our employees get out of the office and experience new things to gain new perspectives on how to grow. And a little wine and shrimp doesn’t hurt either.

By Andy Hagerman

Illustration by Jump’s Katherine Wakid

What Wine and Shrimp Can Teach Us About Strategy is a post from: Jump Associates

Imagine Alibaba meets Yelp with the personality of Etsy. That’s what the new Maker’s Row website is like. It lets people search through different categories to find factories that are able to produce various products they have in mind.  People can watch videos of factory tours, read other user reviews, and get factory contact information completely free. They break the process down into the various stages of the making process, from ideation to production run so that you can find a factory that will help you with whatever stage you’re at.

“Our mission is to make the manufacturing process simple to understand and easy to access. From large corporations to first time designers, we are providing unparalleled access to industry-specific factories and suppliers across the United States. Our first industry target is apparel and accessories.”

Why this matters:

Maker’s Row is opening the door on a piece of the business landscape that for the last 100 years has been a murky, confusing, unapproachable space. A space reserved for experts and well-scaled companies alone. All of a sudden our wildest dreams are that much closer to coming to life. Not only are factories now within the click of a button, they’ll even help us take a back-of-the-napkin idea and work it through the entire design and production process.

The site also introduces a unknown human element into the world of manufacturing. Most of us simply imagine billowing smoke stacks and “Grapes of Wrath” when we think of factories, but who would’ve guessed there are actually people at the center of all of this…skilled makers in fact! The site sheds an important light on this essential yet often overlooked part of the industrial process.

We’re seeing it in every space. The patients are becoming the physicians. The buyers are becoming the sellers. The consumers are becoming the makers. If companies aren’t thinking about how this is going to happen to their industry then they are blind and are likely to fail. We are going to continue to see industries evolve because their own consumers are taking over their work, unless those companies learn how to evolve and continue supporting their customers in new ways, supplying new information and offerings.

What do you think of the site and Maker’s Row’s mission to make the manufacturing process simple to understand?

By Andy Hagerman

Photo credit: Maker’s Row website

Maker’s Row Casts a Sexy Light on American Factories. is a post from: Jump Associates

I was just reading this NY Times article about how elderly people’s health dramatically differs based on what stereotypes about the elderly are pervasive. If there are negative stereotypes, elderly folks will have lower cognitive function and physical health, and they will be less likely to seek preventative care. However, if positive stereotypes are pervasive, the elderly will be more sharp and bounce back more easily from disability.

When stereotypes are negative — when seniors are convinced becoming old means becoming useless, helpless or devalued — they are less likely to seek preventive medical care and die earlier, and more likely to suffer memory loss and poor physical functioning, a growing body of research shows.

When stereotypes are positive — when older adults view age as a time of wisdom, self-realization and satisfaction — results point in the other direction, toward a higher level of functioning. The latest report, in The Journal of the American Medical Association, suggests that seniors with this positive bias are 44 percent more likely to fully recover from a bout of disability.

For people who care about and interact with older people, the message is clear: your attitude counts because it can activate or potentially modify these deeply held age stereotypes.

What I find interesting about this is that having pure intention for people also applies to people’s health. By “putting a ten” over our elderly (seeing the best in someone), they are more healthy, smart, and able to continue contributing to society. Yet another reason Jump’s value of Pure Intention should be practiced in all areas of our lives, not just at work.

By Alison Mora

Photo credit, Fred R. Conrad, The New York Times

A Positive Attitude With the Elderly Can Help Reduce Healthcare Costs is a post from: Jump Associates

Smartphone payments. Peer-to-peer lending. Geolocation-based offers. Biometric security. The death of retail branches? The end of payments networks? Commoditization of banking services?

In banking, mobile technology could change everything. Or it could simply be an enabler.

So how will mobility affect banking?

This question was the focus of last night’s AMCF Horizon Series Strategy Event, hosted at Jump’s New York office.

Keynote speaker Michael Saylor, founder and CEO of Microstrategy and author of The Mobile Wave, predicted that the “fifth wave” of computing – mobile – will affect everything from education to security to the global workforce. Saylor believes that mobile technology will force further consolidation in banking.

The event paired Saylor’s vision for the future with a conversation with the leaders who are at the helm of this change. Jump’s Alonzo Canada moderated a panel discussion featuring John Rosenfeld, EVP and Head of Retail Deposits and Payments at TD Bank, and Rich Naddy, Managing Director of Information Services and Global Business Enterprise Payments at Citi.

Both Rosenfeld and Naddy underscored the importance of a robust omnichannel strategy. Admittedly, that’s something that banks are still trying to figure out. But despite the current business press fascination with mobile technology, Rosenfeld reminded the room that when we need help, we don’t turn to Siri. We turn to people. That human interaction is what we’re hard-wired for.

While technology can help us conduct rote tasks, we ultimately need to trust the people and organizations that are custodians of our money. Trust isn’t something we can buy, and it’s not something that can easily come from a digital interaction. There’s no app for that. But trust is one of the most important assets that banks have, and it’s one of their best defenses against the commoditizing pressures of networks, merchants, telecoms, device manufacturers, and app makers all jumping into territory that was once the exclusive domain of banks.

How, then, can an omnichannel, mobile-enabled strategy enhance these customer relationships? Perhaps banks can take a page from Amazon’s playbook. As Naddy pointed out, conducting business across multiple channels can help banks get better data on customers, and make smarter choices about how, where, and when to serve them. These new data sets can help banks make targeted offers, create tailored products, and perhaps even piggyback on customers’ digital social relationships.

Banking is at a tipping point. With change coming from all sides – consumer behavior, technology, merchant demands, and new entrants into the sector – it seems that banks needs to rethink everything from their channel strategy to their partnerships. And mobile technology is likely to be a key piece of the puzzle.

So will mobility change everything? What do you think?

By Lauren Pollak, Jump Associates

Feature or Future? How will Mobile Affect Banking? is a post from: Jump Associates

I recently had the opportunity to speak at a Health+Design event in New York, a night spent discussing the intersection of healthcare, design, and business strategy. I was able to share the experience I had conducting research for a project with Stanford Medical Center. After the event, I was approached by a woman who told me she had been a nurse for 25 years in the New York area. She said the entire event she couldn’t get her mind off of one part of my story – the fact that to create our strategies we first spent time following doctors around. I had shared the process of going into the field, shadowing doctors at work and at home to get a better understanding of the many pressures demanding their time and attention. It made so much sense, she praised, yet in her 25 years as a nurse she had never seen such an approach.

Just a week later I heard the same feedback.

One Sunday night I was being a good son and giving my mom a weekly phone call to catch-up. I told her I was scheduled to be kicking off a new project soon in which I’d be examining the relationships between hospitals, medical device companies, and governments of developing countries. I explained I would be interviewing doctors, government officials and health-care experts, understanding how to create better systems to help those countries develop.

A moment of silence passed and then an excited “Whoa!” came through the line. See, in the 30 years she had been a social worker at a non-profit hospital, she had accumulated all sorts of stories, insights, and experiences worth sharing. But alas, she had never been asked to contribute to top-line strategy like that.

What many healthcare systems are lacking today is a true sense of empathy. For the patients being helped. For the doctors who are helping. For the families of the sick. For the administrators creating the systems. Unfortunately everyone is so pressed for time, money, and mindshare that taking the extra moment for a deeper examination just isn’t possible.

But the times are changing. Building this flexibility into the healthcare system won’t be optional for long. It will be mandatory for success.

In a recent FastCompany article, editor-in-chief Robert Safian talks about what he calls the Generation Flux – the chaotic environment of business and culture in our world today. In the article, General Stanley McChrystal discusses his experience leading U.S. operations in Afghanistan:

 “We grew up in the military with this [classic hierarchy]: one person at the top, with two to seven subordinates below that, and two to seven below that, and so on. That’s what organizational theory says works,” he explains. Against Al Qaeda, however, “we had to change our structure, to become a network. We were required to react quickly. Instead of decisions being made by people who were more senior – the assumption that senior meant wiser – we found that the wisest decisions were usually made by those closest to the problem.”

Granted, this is a drastic case, it’s representative of the rapidly changing state of…well everything right now. The healthcare system will soon be forced to start working together and better understand the knowledge and input that everyone, and I mean everyone, is bringing to the table. I’d say it makes sense to jump on that trend earlier than later.

By Andy Hagerman

Photo from flickr.

Why Healthcare Should Let Frontline Empathy Influence More Strategy is a post from: Jump Associates

What

State Farm insurance recently launched Next Door, essentially a large café-like working space where people can just come in, hang out, drink coffee, and if they want, talk to onsite coaches about finances, planning and insurance. And it’s all free, except the coffee (it’s allegedly good, local coffee). They also encourage people to rent spaces and host events.

Where

Chicago, but it sounds like more sites to come if successful.

Why

State Farm claims they don’t try to push any types of products on guests. They say it’s really more about having honest planning and educational conversations. Their website states that the intent of the space is to enable them to learn about new consumer needs and understand people better.

So What

In the financial services work we’ve done, the lack of options for unwealthy and younger demographics (gen x/y/z) to get help in planning their finances has come up repeatedly as a need. This is a smart play, particularly in a market when people’s financial needs are changing rapidly, and most younger generations have been filled with a sense of denial around these topics. There is a gap and if someone steps up to the plate now, they could be signing on a whole generation with massive lifetime value.

Also, by encouraging people to host events in the space, they are taking strides at building a strong community. Of course, every time that community meets, they will be exposed to the State Farm brand in an interesting way.

By Andy Hagerman

Like a Good Neighbor, State Farm Launches ‘Next Door’ Community Space. is a post from: Jump Associates