Quality and Innovation

An environmental analysis (or environmental assessment) is a decision-making tool, often applied in technology management to characterize the forces impacting an emerging technology or a new or existing product. The environmental analysis can help you determine the effects of a proposed project or policy, and to proactively assess the impacts of a developing or emerging product or discipline. An environmental analysis also provides a really useful structure for learning about an area or a theme new to you or your company and identifying what the “state of the art” is (e.g. petascale computing, nanotechnology, innovative composite materials).

To conduct an environmental analysis, you should investigate and outline:

• CONTEXT. The technology of interest and the context in which it is/to be used
• CHALLENGES. The challenges that are presently identifiable; what you know, and how it compares and contrasts with the unknowns
• EXTERNAL ENVIRONMENT. How the competitive environment impacts the scenario. This can be done via SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) and/or by examining Porter’s (1980) Five Forces (supplier power, barriers to entry, threat of substitutes, buyer power, degree of rivalry)
• INTERNAL ENVIRONMENT. How themes influence and affect the scenario (e.g. via PEST analysis – political, economic, socio-cultural, technological impacts)
• ALTERNATIVES. Examine alternatives to the scenario being evaluated, and investigate what criteria (e.g. values, beliefs, project constraints, technical constraints) might be used if you will choose between competing alternatives in the future

Where can you get data for an environmental analysis? In addition to searching through resources from newspapers, magazines and trade journals, check the following:

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)

• The OECD statistics portal contains international databases on agriculture, education, development, finance, labor, science and technology, energy, globalization, productivity, welfare, transport
• Their online library also contains environmental outlooks, news on economic policy reforms, and issues like work/life balance

World Economic Forum Global Competitiveness Report

• In the Growth Competitiveness Index (GCI) issued by the World Economic Forum, which is measured for more a hundred countries every year, there are four dimensions of global competitiveness routinely assessed: institutions, infrastructure, the macroeconomic environment, and health and education.
• Because technology has the potential to impact productivity at many levels, and because it is embedded in each of these areas, the effects of technological change are implicit in macroeconomic measures of competitiveness.
• You can learn more about the Global Competitiveness Report on Wikipedia
• Or use the Analyzer to explore the data

National Science Foundation Solicitations for Research Proposals – The NSF solicitations are an excellent place to learn about the state of the art in various fields. The solicitations explain what topics are the most interesting to the experts today, and what they are willing to pay to know more about. Often, the solicitations will explain the most recent trends that may be difficult to ascertain from the industry and academic literature.

Is the flu spreading across your state? You can find out using Google Flu Trends, which projects the spread of influenza based on how people are using Google to search for health information. Check out the movie illustrating how search data appears to correlate with flu data from the Center for Disease Control.

The reason this interests me is that Google is using a tracer – examining search patterns in terms of where the searches are originating from geographically to infer how diseases might be spreading. They are not tracking diagnosis information or other “hard” data which would affirm the presence of disease, only recognizing that people will tend to be more interested in the flu when they’re trying to figure out whether they have it! (The most useful aspect of the search data is that it appears to serve as a leading indicator for the CDC data, which has a two week lag.)

Are any companies out there using patterns in their Google searches on their websites to infer what consumers or constituents are most interested in at any given time? It would be interesting to see what other “real” things Google search data can serve as a leading indicator for. I could see this as a useful technique for diagnosing the “voice of the customer” in a novel way.

“You can only manage what you measure.” Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ve heard this statement so often that I’m not sure whether it’s a valuable heuristic or just a cliché. What I do know is that I (personally) tend to like measuring for two reasons: 1) I’m not good at remembering things that happened in the past, and so measurement provides me with an objective line in the sand that I can use to gauge improvement, and 2) for some unknown visceral reason, it just feels wrong not to do it.

But then I read the story of Ari Derfel, who I call the “Trash Guy” – and this completely shifted the way I look at measurement. Motivated by a dinner conversation with friends, he decided that he was going to “keep” his trash for one year to see what he was throwing away. Starting in December 2006, he stashed his trash in the basement (cleaned, of course) just to see what refuse he (personally) was producing. After some dedicated time measuring and observing his trash-producing habits, he found that his consumption habits and spending habits changed!

Here’s what he says about his “lessons learned”:

Some of the things that I learned are interesting. I learned what I spent most of my money on because by watching a pile of trash grow over a year, I really began to see, “Wow! I spent it on that food, on this electronic, on that item,” and my consumption habits and spending habits became really clear.

The second thing that I learned really powerfully, in addition to what I spend my money on, is what I put in my body. I started to see things pile up. The most commonly talked about are little stacks of pints of non-dairy ice cream that I would eat: pint one, pint two, pint three, pint 12, pint 15. I started to see what lives in my body, and what kind of fuel I’m choosing to put in my body.

Then, I learned where most trash seems to be made, food packaging. Of all the different things that could be making trash, that was really profound to me because I realized that it’s not that big of a problem. I mean, we’ve only been packaging food for 50, 60 or 75 years. So, if that’s the small amount of time in which the problem was created. We should be able to undo the problem. Those are three of the primary things that I learned.

Then I learned that if I composted everything organic, which I did, trash doesn’t smell. That’s an awesome thing to learn because most folks think of the dump or, trash and they think it smells really disgusting. I realized, “Wow! That’s not the case.” If we properly treat all of our organic matter, that’s not going to be a problem.

Measurement can motivate people – in a profound way – to change their behavior. After reading about Ari’s trash escapades, I started thinking about the trash I produce. I’m looking at all those plastic bottles I drink water from with a little disdain now. I’m saving a lot more of those empty Country Crock containers. I’m far more conscious of the proliferation of plastic bags in modern food packaging. I’m really looking fondly at that burlap bag with the 15 lbs of rice in it… I can use that for something else later, when the rice is gone. I’m actually cooking dinner more – from scratch. And I haven’t even started seriously measuring yet.