mobileYouth Idea Factory

For those of us who have taken access to electricity for granted, we'd probably see a whole lot of 'dangers' with Amos Njoroge's wooden extension cables. For instance, the risk of fire from electric sparks or the fact that wood is a far worse insulator when damp compared to plastic or ceramic.

But then again, in the Kiandutu slums of Thika, Kenya, safe & branded extension cables are hard to come by. There was a big need gap crippling all the homes and businesses in the area.

Amos had wanted to become an electrical engineer but could not afford the fees. So he taught himself some skills and began a small start-up called 'Gigantic Electronics'. He set up an assembly line and began creating and selling wooden extension cables.

By the looks of it he seems to be doing well.

We talk about 'hackers' a lot in business and marketing these days. But what we ignore is that hackers have always been around, still are out there and will continue to delight us with their unique ways of getting things done. Their ways might not be polished enough for the well funded innovation labs but hackers do a better job of identifying need gaps and plugging it with their unique inventions.

If you are looking for the next big thing, keep an eye out for the thousands of small things that hackers around the world are doing every day.

If you are still one of those who believe design can win the battle for smartphone supremacy, then your work is cut out to deciding whether or not to put a button on your phone or what metal/alloy to use for the back cover?

The Age of Differentiation (which ended around the time iPhone was released) made it easier for mobile handsets to differentiate based on their design - color, shape, size etc.

Today, in the Age of Discovery, all phones look and feel the same - and dare I say they, they even do the same things equally well. The battle is not in how brands differentiate but how customers use it to discover their passions.

You cannot gamify a bad expereince and hope it gets better.

Gamification is not the next big thing. It's actually not even a thing. It's childish and charming. It makes thing interesting but not necessarily better.

Applying gamification to the field of medicine so that kids take their pills on schedule is great.
Applying gamification to marketing so that customers get badges for store visits and repeat purchases is treating people like lab rats stuck in a glass cage with access to a lever which upon being pressed releases dopamine into their heads.

But people are smart. They will soon realize what's going on. It might seem fun and the media might glorify it as being addictive, but overall it does not contribute to their lives (social lives) in any form.

Gamification, in its current avatar, is just another form of popularity contest. A product of our fear driven culture. It too shall pass.

Luke and mum Julie Muller.

When Luke Armstrong got his first girlfriend he acted like any other teenage boy – spending hours on the phone to his new love.

But the 14-year-old left his mum Julie Muller stunned after running up a bill of more than £900.

Boy meets girl.
Boy likes girl.
Girl likes boy.
They exchange numbers.
They text and call each other like it's the end of world.
Mom is shocked that the monthly mobile bill is GBP 900!
Mom wants spending limits and alerts set up on O2.
O2 tells mom "Well you should have given him a pay-as-you-go plan. Please pay the 900 pounds in monthly installment while we take away his phone."

O2 could have at least started a boyfriend-girlfriend plan with unlimited texting. I mean, have a heart!

The interesting bit from this story is how Luke's bill skyrocketed when he got a girlfriend. Before that he was very responsible.
We all like to think teens are 'addicted' to texting and mobile phones. Well Luke was really just connecting with his girlfriend. What teenager wouldn't?
And teenagers are not mindlessly texting everyone. They need a social context to text each other. Getting a girfriend is one heck of a social context.

Interestingly one in 10 teenagers admitted to having bought a second mobile, which their parents did not know about, in order to get around the ban.

So we live in an age where the harshest punishment for a teenager who flunks his exam or stays out late is to take away their mobile phones.

Interestingly 10% of them have a second mobile phone hidden from their parents. I'm pretty sure these 10% will 'influence' the rest of the 90% and in two years time all teens will have their secret second mobile phones.

What is more interesting is the fact that when the parents used to be teenagers, their parents would dole out the harshest punishment by keeping them indoors and not letting them interact with friends.

If you think about it, taking mobile phones away from teenagers basically takes them out of the social loop same way their parents were out of the loop when stuck indoors. Quite interesting to think that parents restrict or cut off social ties as a form of punishment. Most prisons dole out solitary confinement as their harshest punishment to those deserving. I'm just saying....

Early papers by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, the founding fathers of behavioural economics, applied a simple psychological effect to economic decisions: framing. Their research shows how people’s response to a decision is dramatically shifted by the way it is framed, despite the content of the proposition remaining the same.

Research is the business of asking questions. The way a question is framed influences the answer. The point is so obvious it becomes invisible and consequently we forget how important it is. Behavioural economics reminds us.

Not many people realize that research is a craft that requires skills which need to be developed over a period of time.

A key skill among good researchers is to ask the right question. Framing the right question might sound trivial to big brands who invest billions on research. But it can result in the difference between an insightful and actionable finding or basic reporting in the final deliverable.