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Solar Impulse // Lovely Achievement

Solar Impulse goes around the world, completing its mission proving that zero-emissions is possible! #futureisclean https://t.co/Yt7XBnOHBx

— SOLAR IMPULSE (@solarimpulse) July 26, 2016

I believe #futureisclean b/c Solar Impulse completed the 1st solar-powered round-the-world flight. Take it further! https://t.co/iJGunokUf8

— SOLAR IMPULSE (@solarimpulse) July 26, 2016

Congratulation to the #solarimpulse Team, Great TEAM spirit ! pic.twitter.com/EaeLmucK9w

— SOLAR IMPULSE (@solarimpulse) July 26, 2016

Some of the best pictures from the adventure:

More: blog.SolarImpulse.com


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CODEGIRL is a documentary film that follows the story of 5,000 girls from 60 countries (including Nigeria) as they compete in the "Technovation" global entrepreneurship and coding competition.


Watch (at least watch the second half),
share (with the young girls and techies in your life),
and make sure you leave a comment about the cool ending.

Details: The girls have three months to develop an app that attempts to solve a problem in their local community. In the film, they size up their competition, interact with teachers and local mentors, learn to code, and pitch their ideas all in hopes of winning $10,000 in funding and support. REALLY COOL ENDING.

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Do great things with the most productive devices on the planet

Microsoft's offering these new devices:
Surface book (the ultimate laptop), Surface Pro 4 (ultra-portable tablet),  Microsoft band (fitness wearable), and Lumia 950XL (the phone that works like a PC, with Windows 10)

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"But the German way with money is to keep it quiet"

"It is not the kind of place then to approve of young millionaires roaring around in expensive cars - they may make the Porsches and the BMWs but it's for others to rev them up and show off."

"In the US and Britain, business people are part of public life. Warren Buffett gives press conferences. Bill Gates tours the world, banging the drum for measures to prevent disease. Every American city has a museum or a medical research centre or a university department named after a local moneybags."

In Nigeria, ... , never mind.

Enjoy Germany's super-shy super-rich, by Stephen Evans, for BBC News. 
This article is my source for the quotes above, and is reprinted below.

Karl Albrecht and the shop that began the Aldi empire

Nobody could accuse the richest people in Germany of flaunting their wealth, quite the opposite.

With the death of Karl Albrecht, there was no announcement for nearly a week, and not until the small, private funeral was over. He and his brother, Theo, had turned their mother's small grocery store in the Ruhr into Aldi, one of the world's biggest supermarket chains, but the habits and thoughts of this mega-business mogul were unknown.  For the obituaries the German papers could only trace bland statements he had made in 1953 and 1971.
This was not a chatty public figure.
He grew orchids, apparently, and played golf - but on his own, private golf course. In the absence of a public presence, a legend grew around him.
The brothers, ex-employees said, would keep accounts using stubs of old pencils, almost too short to hold. It is said that they once told architects designing a new store that they were using paper that was too thick.  

It was this frugality which set the Albrecht brothers on the road to super-rich status.

The Aldi chain began after Theo and Karl Albrecht took over their mother's grocery shop in the Ruhr

After the war, they took over the grocery store and set up a company called Aldi after Albrecht Diskont.  They pared the costs to the bone, dispensing with advertising and relying on the reputation for low prices. They sold what sold quickly, only 300 items initially.  Even shelves were thought to be too extravagant - after all shelves had to be stacked and that meant stackers and that meant wages. Instead, the goods were deposited, in the stores on the pallets on which they arrived.
Even today, Aldi stores usually offer no more than 2,000 products compared with the 45,000 products for other chains.
Food tended to be in tins because fresh food cost money to store. Managers had no telephones - they were told to use the nearest pay phone.

When Theo was kidnapped in 1971, Karl negotiated - over some days, according to the German media - and then paid the ransom which, legend has it, he tried to offset against tax. 

If Karl Albrecht was reclusive, the head of the rival Lidl chain is positively invisible.

There are only two photographs in existence of Dieter Schwarz, and one of those is in black-and-white. He may be the 25th richest man on the planet but nobody outside his closest circle knows anything about what he thinks or does. 

It is the same with the Quandt family which owns BMW. The product may be a symbol of conspicuous consumption but they are a symbol of inconspicuous taciturnity.
Take the case of Susanne Klatten, the daughter of the industrialist Herbert Quandt, the man who made BMW the luxury-car colossus it is today. She was left 12.5 % of BMW.
With her other business interests, she is the 44th richest person in the world, but a woman with a low profile. When she started in business, learning at the bottom, as an apprentice, she worked at a BMW factory under a false name.
The man she married never knew her real identity until the romance was solid.

Susanne Klatten is Germany's richest woman

It would be tempting to draw big conclusions about the reticence of Germany's super-rich. 

 

In the US and Britain, business people are part of public life. Warren Buffett gives press conferences. Bill Gates tours the world, banging the drum for measures to prevent disease. Every American city has a museum or a medical research centre or a university department named after a local moneybags. 

But the German way with money is to keep it quiet.

It is partly because frugality is a virtue, a matter of morality and not just of wise behaviour. And maybe, after the experience of Theo Albrecht, privacy means you're less likely to get kidnapped.
It is not the kind of place then to approve of young millionaires roaring around in expensive cars - they may make the Porsches and the BMWs but it's for others to rev them up and show off.

The figures show that private wealth in Germany is more unevenly distributed than in any other country in the eurozone. While the richest 1% have personal wealth of just short of one million euros on average, a quarter of adult Germans have no wealth or even owe money.
But because those with the money keep their heads down, it doesn't always show.

Big Boy Bill

"I start with architecture, and Mark starts with products, and Steve Jobs started with aesthetics."

Bill Gates, by Roberto Parada

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/bill-gates-the-rolling-stone-interview-20140313

How the leading Chinese Telecommunications Companies acquire innovation capability

By EKPUNOBI Victor, UWHUMVAKPOR Uvie Larry, and CHIMEZIE Clifford C.

How did Huawei, ZTE, and all the other well-known telecomms companies achieve what they did?  We will consider the companies along four dimensions: company aspiration, marketing, innovation, and management. 

Introduction: ABOUT HUAWEI

Huawei is a Chinese multinational networking and telecommunications equipment and services company headquartered in Shenzhen, Guangdong. It is the largest telecommunications equipment maker in the world, having overtaken Ericsson in 2012.

Huawei was founded in 1988 by ex-military officer Ren Zhengfei and formed as a private company owned by its employees. Its core missions are building telecommunications networks; providing operational and consulting services and equipment to enterprises inside and outside of China; and manufacturing communications devices for the consumer market. Huawei has over 140,000 employees, around 46% of whom are engaged in research and development (R&D). It has 20 R&D institutes in countries including China, the United States,  Germany, Sweden, Ireland, India,Russia, and Turkey,  and in 2011 invested around US$3.74 billion in R&D.

In 2010, Huawei recorded profit of 23.8 billion CNY (3.7 billion USD). Its products and services have been deployed in more than 140 countries and it currently serves 45 of the world's 50 largest telecoms operators.

Introduction: ABOUT ZTE

ZTE Corporation (formerly Zhongxing Telecommunication Equipment Corporation) is a Chinese multinational telecommunications equipment and systems company headquartered in Shenzhen, China. It is the world's fourth-largest mobile phone manufacturer measured by 2012 unit sales^[2] and the world's fifth-largest telecoms equipment maker measured by 2011 revenues (after Ericsson,Huawei, Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia Siemens Networks).^[3]

ZTE's core products are wireless, exchange, access, optical transmission and data telecommunications gear; mobile phones;^[4] and telecommunications software.^[5] It also offers products that provide value-added services,^[6] such as video on demand and streaming media.^[7] ZTE primarily sells products under its own name but it is also an OEM, manufacturing some products which retail under other brand names.^[8]

ZTE was founded in 1985 by a group of state-owned enterprises associated with China's Ministry of Aerospace.

1.    Aspiration level

 Aspiration level is a soft index which is difficult to measure—not like revenue or investment level which can be expressed clearly by numbers.

Huawei’s aspiration level leads the pack.  This company has invested heavily in research and development, as seen in the high number of patent applications – number 1 in 2009.  Ren Zhenfei, founder of Huawei, expects that Huawei’s development in future can go beyond the dependence on single competition element including technology, talent and capital; no longer rely on blind low-cost production. He expects Huawei to become a business organization with high effectiveness, and eventually grows into an international enterprise.

By comparison, ZTE’s culture is pragmatic, controllable, invisible and tangible. Like Huawei, ZTE’s investment to R&D is also about 10%, but they are more cautious about entering new areas.  Before an obvious market potential is visible, they are extremely cautious to present to market, and every further step has to be verified by visible market potential. We conclude it has a moderate aspiration level, which is also heavily rooted in the company’s history and culture.

At Datang, the high aspiration level is fulfilled through the government’s financial support, not though market. Quite a large part of the research funding of Datang is from the central government’s budget. This kind of aspiration level is not sustainable, because it is sustained largely by external funding support.

Eastcom suffers from lack of sufficient aspiration level. From the very beginning, it was an OEM factory and more than ten years later it is still an OEM factory. Even employees at the company despise its overwhelming interest in making money and shortage of pursuit of core competency.

When UTstar gained sudden ascendancy, many people envied its success.  But it declined just as fast, and many think it’s because it failed to build core competency and core product. This opportunism, coupled with a disordered management, led to its short-term success story. 

2.    Marketing Capability

Marketing capability simply means market judgment.

Huawei and ZTE go together on this one. They are both very good at marketing, in fact they are overwhelmingly skilled. We know that Huawei and ZTE are persistent in R&D investment, but they are also very careful in investing in R&D: every decision has to be verified by market demand, confirmed by market potential. The typical example is their strategy of “encircled cities from countryside”.

Around the early 1990s, the two companies perceived that although the Chinese mobile market was mostly occupied by multinationals, these big companies had no time to take care rural market and marginal region. Just because these niche markets were ignored by the big competitors, or more exactly were despised as lower end market by the MNC, Huawei and ZTE decided to develop self-owned product to meet the demand for rural telephony and marginal network. The breakthrough started from these niche markets and then based on the small breakthrough, they nibbled the rest market little by little.

With regard to the two companies Eastcom and UTstar, we have to admire their excellent market view. Eastcom was a very small telecom equipment manufacture before the early of 1990s, but they’re aware the tendency when technology evolves from fixed line to mobile, and grasped the opportunity by first working as OEM and agent for Motorola.

3.    Learning And Innovation

Learning and innovation are very crucial in all telecommunication industries, and depend heavily on R&D i.e. Research and Development. All companies willing to make progress always have a group of people or a department working on the research and development. The future of the company might not be certain with the absence of R&D.

The R&D in telecommunications can be divided into three layers. The first is the physical layer of research; they are the basic algorithm research which can make revolutionary change in telecom industry. The second layer is the software development, for example chip design. The third layer is the application development.

The latter two layers demand large amount of brain labor to test many changes of software. Whereas the high cost of R&D labour in developed countries limits their activities, Huawei takes advantage of the abundant labor resource, continuously investing in the second and third layers of development by sustained testing and adjustment, and finally realizing technology improvement again and again. 

Huawei’s hi-tech enterprise is termed “knowledge-labor intensive” by the Chinese.  Knowledge-labor refers to that labor who grasps professional knowledge. The strategy fully takes advantage of the human resource of high-tech industry in China, while also avoiding the most challenging technologies, since one has to admit that the current Chinese research level still cannot overcome the core technology.

Generally speaking, the observation and discussion with Huawei and ZTE tell me that their catch-up in technology learning is totally relying on their own development. The most common method is that they import foreign technology or product, then deploy large amount of engineers to imitate and modify. This is called “technology-borrower.”

Management capability

Management capability is heavily correlated with innovation capability. Successful R&D is absolutely not simply adding up talent and capital, neither is it an issue that can be solved by FDI. An effective and sustainable R&D demands continuous catch-up in technology, from the beginning it requires an accurate market sense, then it is going to involve an organization’s comprehensive decision making capability, finally follow-up project management and logistics management are also necessary.  Conversely, poor management will eventually neglect talent and waste capital.

Huawei learns a lot from western countries.  From 1992, Ren visited companies in the US, European countries and Japan, including Alcatel, Siemens and other leading companies. After visiting Hughs, IBM, Bell Innovations and HP in 1997, he proposed a reform plan after deliberate consideration. The proposal laid foundation for Huawei’s global operation strategy. The proposal presented by Ren was not based on the “Chinese way”, but “integrating global resource into Huawei’s network” based on global perspective.

From 1998, Huawei decided to focus on IBM as its learning model and strategic partner in the path to become an international enterprise. Huawei firstly defined its transformation from telecom equipment manufacturer to telecom total solution provider and service provider, in order to fully take advantage of full scale products line.

In the following five years, Huawei invited 50 IBM management consultants to work on the Huawei project in order to improve internal management and business procedure, by investment 50 million USD. In addition, Huawei set up a 300-employee management engineering department to handle implementation of IBM’s recommendations.

 ZTE: There are many studies about Huawei’s management, but few about ZTE. One of the reasons is that Huawei’s “wolf” culture is certainly attention-grabbing, but the “golden mean” of bull culture from ZTE is much less attractive.

Most of the ZTE employees who have been working for them are still with them since the past ten years. ZTE always steadily occupies and expands in the market. In 2000, when IT industry was suffering winter, ZTE kept it as another high speed year; from 2001 to 2003, when other Chinese companies including Huawei tried to freeze hiring or even laid off many people, ZTE still kept hiring many new employees. This shows a very high management capability.

Huawei and ZTE are quite successful when facing management transformation.  Huawei applies the western system which manages people by a regulation and proceeding. ZTE follows a Chinese Confucianism management model to manage people by relationship and bond. Both of these two systems make it possible to motivate all the people in the company to work for the enterprise by combined efforts, but not get collapse for their own interest.  Both have created a management system which is supported or accepted by most of their employees.

From the case of UTstar, we find that although they bought a handful of foreign companies, they failed to transform the external knowledge into their core competency. Companies like UTstar remained on the surface in their adoption of various technologies; they did not manage to absorb and make these purchased technologies their own. It is not because of wisdom or foolishness of the company, it is because of the management quality.

Eastcom expected FDI could bring technology improvement, and reaped tragic results. 

All those other companies, like Dragon, Huawei, and ZTE, that ever acquired core technologies mostly depended on self development.  These companies started when the Chinese market just opened, in the background of limited information and knowledge from foreign countries, they depended on their own capability and university resources to develop their own technology.

Based on the 2011 paper:  A COMPARISON STUDY OF THE CHINESE TELECOM INDUSTRY, by Hui Yan, Aalborg University, Denmark. 

The three authors are undergraduate students in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Bells University of Technology.  They studied Hui Yan’s paper and prepared this summary under my supervision  for the course CEN 302: Introduction to ICT.  - Tosin Otitoju

ICT IN CHINA: Aspiration and Innovation in Chinese telecoms companies

By IGBERAESE J. Abumere, DOSUNMU Ayomide, CHINAGOROM Y. Chinonyerem, and OLULOLA Oluwasefunmi Tolulope

INTRODUCTION

The Chinese telecom companies are recognized as the most innovative industry in China.  Besides Huawei, there was also the emergence of other telecom companies such as Datang, Great Dragon, ZTE among others.

We have many questions about the emergence of these Chinese telecom industries.  The most important question is: why did Huawei and ZTE emerge as the leading telecom companies in

China rather than other companies with strong backgrounds and higher starting point like Datang and Great Dragon.  One reason is what the author calls Aspiration Level. 

ASPIRATION LEVEL

Company	Aspiration Level	Description	Result
Huawei	Wolf	Military style, high survival pressure, accurate eyesight, high efficiency	Purpose to be the first class enterprise
ZTE	Bull	State owned background, but learnt to be pragmatic in the south business environment.	Purpose to overtake Huawei
Datang	Half academic, half business	Financed by the government to do R&D for a long while	Purpose to do standardisation
Dragon	Firework	Originally with high aspiration level, but cannot follow further constrained by system problem.	Almost disappeared
Eastcom	Businessman	From the beginning, it aimed to earn money	Tried to upgrade but eventually still ends up with OEM.

Aspiration level is a soft index which is difficult to measure unlike sales revenue and even investment level which can be expressed clearly by numbers. Aspiration level is an index which is difficult to measure but heavily influences the company’s employees, like an invisible power.

A company’s aspiration level can be reflected in a company’s ultimate goal---through analysis of a company’s ultimate goal, we can preliminarily identify the tone of the company’s culture. Obviously, Huawei has been recognized as the “wolf company” in the industry for a long while, it means a company with high aspiration level to be innovative and creative. 

Further, the aspiration level reflects in how entrepreneurial the company remains. Huawei has kept investing research and development - up to 10% of its total revenue - for many years.  In 2009, Huawei became the No.1 patent applicant (it was No.2 in 2010.)

Huawei’s high aspiration level may be related to the founder’s thoughts of Huawei and the background of the company.  Huawei is typical grass-roots company without any government or state background, it all developed by its own efforts. The founder Ren Zhenfei was an army man for many years, possessing soldier’s qualities – a strict, high pressure, persistent personality. As the spiritual leader of Huawei, Ren’s personality has largely influenced the culture of the company.  

LEARNING AND INNOVATIVE CAPABILITY

Innovation is both a process and a product. It is

• the organizational and social processes that produce innovation, such as individual creativity, organizational structure, environmental context, and social and economic factors

• an outcome that manifests itself in new products, product features, and production methods

Huawei employed the open innovation method (the use of purposive flows and outflows of

knowledge to accelerate internal innovation and expand markets for external use of innovation

respectively)

Innovative capacity and marketing capacity complement to each other. In fact, marketing capacity divorced from learning and innovative capability could only bring temporary resplendence.  A company without capable marketing capability cannot raise sufficient resource to support learning and innovation.

Huawei and ZTE are persistent in R&D investment, but they are also very careful in investing

in R&D: every decision has to be verified by market demand, confirmed by market potential.

Huawei’s catch-up in technology learning totally relies on their own development. The most common method is that they import foreign technology or product, then deploy large amount of engineers to imitate and modify. This is called technology-borrower. When Mr. Ren was invited to give a talk after visiting couple of hi-tech companies, he said something meaningful: “Founder has technology but no management; Lenovo has management but no technology; Huawei has neither technology nor management.”   

Many audiences thought that it was a humble comment from Mr. Ren. However, from Ren’s point of view, the real “core technology” should “create opportunity and lead consumption”, which is quite different from Huawei’s “seek and grasp opportunity” technology.  

Generally speaking, usually the Chinese enterprise can only notice an opportunity after it emerges from potential stage, if they can make correct decision and grasp the opportunity then they can get success.   Huawei is a successful example of this.   However those leading MNC are conducting another method by “creating opportunity and leading consumption” relying on their R&D to create opportunity.  Thus Huawei is defined as a “late comer” in the market: for late comer, it is to seek and grasp opportunity; for forerunner it is to create opportunity and lead consumption. Ren’s point is that Huawei’s technology which can only ”seek and grasp opportunity” is not the true technology, only the “creating opportunity and leading consumption” can be defined as true technology .

Technology innovation is fundamentally based on innovation talent, while talent used is heavily

relevant to capital and culture. Where can Huawei acquire these talents? Most of their employees are directly hired from university. For example, Huawei hired directly from campus less than 2000 graduates from 2002 to 2008. In the year of 2009 it reached 6000. This is called “circling talents” strategy. For example, Huawei claimed that they would hire all the engineering master graduates of the top 10 in the class from top universities.

Major source: A COMPARISON STUDY OF THE CHINESE TELECOM INDUSTRY,  published 2011.  By Hui Yan, Aalborg University, Denmark. 

The four authors are undergraduate students in the College of Engineering at Bells University of Technology, Ogun State, Nigeria.  They prepared this paper under my supervision for the course CEN 302: Introduction to ICT.