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FOCUS CPC NEWSLETTER

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Index

A Tradition for Succession Creates an Immediate Competitive Advantage 2

A Personnel Crisis 2 Rethinking Getting the Right People 2No Shortcuts to a Succession Tradition 3

Competitive Advantages Survive for only 365 Days in the Fast Economy 4

Is the Talent Pool of the “Innovation Gang” in Your Organization Drying Up? 4

Ecosystem Platforms: The Elegy for Perpetual Business Models 5Innovate or Die 5The Story of Microbusinesses - Large Platforms and Small Front-Ends 6Instantaneous Strategy: More Flexible and Resilient 74 Major Skills that Cross 3 Different Areas 7Succession Tradition: Global Talent Without Borders 8

Gogoro Mobilizes Its Gang of Innovators 10

How Riding an Electric Scooter Became Fashionable and Green 10

Commerce 4.0 Makes Life More Exciting 10Achievement Badges Make Collecting Rewards for Scooter Riding Fun and Easy 11The Transformation of Scooters into Fashion Icons 11Never Say No – The Great Achievement of Gogoro’s Innovation Gang 12The Sharing Economy Is Collaborative Rivalry, not Competition 12Where to Next? 13

iCHEF Information Consulting Incorporated 14

An App for a New Era of Restaurateurship – A Smart Point of Sale System Takes on the

Daily Bustle of the Restaurant Business 14

A Professional Gang of Four 14Aspiring to Become the Ikea of POS Systems 15Partnering with Restaurants for Long-Term Growth 16The Potential Power of a Little Universe of Data 17

July, 2016

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A Tradition for Succession Creates an Immediate Competitive Advantage

Dr. Chang Pao-cheng, President of the China Productivity Center andthe Learning and Development (Nengli) Magazine

Jack Welch once said, “We are competing in a global arena without a moment to rest between rounds. Therefore, [choosing my successor] is the most important decision I’ll make. It occupies a considerable amount of thought almost every day.”I believe that although the length of a human life is limited, a business aspires to continue operating for perpetuity. Leaders who desire to create a company that will endure well beyond their own lifespans must, in addition to investing their resources and energy to create an advantageous culture, also deliberately plan to cultivate company leadership at every level. Welch’s General Electric evidences its commitment to total leadership development by spending as much as US$1 billion per year on personnel development and operating its own corporate university—the pioneering and historic Crotonville campus.

A Personnel CrisisAnother reason that companies must actively construct a succession system is that beginning in 2011 Taiwan’s post-war baby boom generation (workers born between 1946 and 1964) will begin to retire. If they start to leave the workforce and

personnel from the new generation are unable to replace them, then companies could face the crisis of a hollowed-out base of personnel. Thus, leaders must take seriously the problem of how newer talent can seamlessly take over the duties of the old core.

And yet, the decision frequently facing many leaders is whether to cultivate required talent from within or recruit it from without. Jim Collins, in his book Built to Last, says that all companies that have endured for over a century cultivate high-potential talent from within, preserving their core values and perpetuating the outstanding quality of their leadership in order to build a foundation for sustainable growth.I have a sense that enterprises primarily function around people. The opportunity to mature in an “organic” organizational environment is even more important to the development of a leader than the abilities, talents, and efforts he or she brings to the job. What I refer to as an organic organizational environment includes the following elements: operational leadership style, the corporate culture of the leadership, rewards for performance, organizational membership, and the industry environment, all of which will influence the success of talent development.

Rethinking Getting the Right PeopleTherefore, a careful consideration of the deeper meaning of the phrase “putting the right people in the right places” should include 3- to 5-year strategic goals according to a business’s vision and mission that clarify which key positions will have the greatest influence on the company’s operations. What competencies, experience, skills, and special abilities do those key positions require? Next, use these conditions to strategically allocate and plan for personnel.

Only by firmly grasping this idea can leaders strengthen their existing human potential both in

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substance and spirit. For example, they can use coaching to guide personnel in finding areas of professional weakness and then help them create customized career development learning plans; then, by means of rotation through different positions, personnel can gain experience and chances to shine in order to continue to enhance their leadership ability.

A business’s ability to rapidly develop each of its potential leaders and promote them step-by-step within the organization will actually help to strengthen leadership at every level. This is essential to laying a solid foundation for the CEO succession process.Consider FedEx as an example. Based on the idea of progressive personnel development to allow everyone to continuously progress, FedEx uses a two-pronged approach of e-learning combined with guidance through “coaching” to enhance its executive leadership ability.

After finishing a lesson, managers meet with their coaches for discussions to help them understand what they learned more deeply and how to apply it to their work. The coaches also share their experience and identify skills for reinforcement and appropriate training methods based on the managers’ questions. The system includes growth, opportunity, leadership and developmental training methods and has supplied FedEx with an endless supply of leadership: over 70% of their high-performing executives were eventually promoted from entry-level positions.

There are no shortcuts a business can take to build its leadership ranks. All steps of the process require careful thought and evaluation from company leaders, from the molding of a people-first company culture through creating an organizational environment that encourages learning and then the formulation of a formal structure. Only when personnel are enabled to exercise their strengths throughout the development process will the “future” competitive advantage of a solid succession tradition be realized.

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Competitive Advantages Survive for only 365 Days in the Fast EconomyIs the Talent Pool of the “Innovation Gang” in Your Organization Drying Up?

It is the era of Commerce 4.0 and the fast economy. The rollback of cross-industry conglomerates, whole industries, and the importance of national borders has occurred at an unimagined rate and has led to sudden changes in strategy, platforms, organization, and personnel. As competition rages over ecosystems and platforms, the average business lifespan has shortened, and competitive advantages can only endure for 365 days. In the face of constantly changing competition, professionals must have four key abilities to ensure a sustainable core business: an ability to think globally, an ability to think flexibly, an ability to operate digitally, and an ability to deepen relationships.

Speaker: May Wei Interview Compiler: Huang Li-qiu

Before I talk about how the Internet has changed the competitive environment, let me first share a personal experience. Two years ago my family of four went on vacation to Disney World in Orlando, U.S.A. When we checked in at the hotel, the service person at the counter gave us four “MagicBands” with our names engraved on them. The MagicBand is a device that combines the functionality of a hotel key, admissions ticket, electronic wallet, and restaurant and activity reservation system into a single wristband. With these, we had no reason to carry a wallet around the parks; we could do anything with them within the time it took to sound a confirmatory “beep.” We stayed there for five days and four nights. On the last day we went to pick up pictures, and I discovered among them a picture of our family suspended in the little train at the highest point of the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad before racing down the hill.

At the time I wondered momentarily how there could have been a photographer in such a high place. Finally, it dawned on me that this was an application of the Internet of Things (IoT): the park had installed cameras on the amusement facilities which then transmitted a signal to the MagicBands we were wearing, and a picture was taken.

Because in my work I have a lot of contact with clients in industrial computing, I often hear words

like Internet, Internet of Things, and big data. However, I had never had any significant experience with any of them. The experience with the photograph at Disney World made me personally experience how the Internet is currently changing your life and mine. I’ll give another example of an application of big data. If you are a customer who enjoys fine gift items, then when you are out window shopping, perhaps when you walk to a point within 500 meters of a boutique selling such items, your cell phone will receive a promotional text sent to you from the shop.

Disrupt ive innova t ion and border less competition have already exceeded what we’ve imagined, and competitors have become impossible to predict. It has become difficult to speak of longevity of core business.Photo from Top Photo Group

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The Internet links things together in a way previously unimagined. Not only has it changed business models; it has also changed the rules of the game of competition. Mainland China has called the Internet “Internet Plus” not because their English is poor but because they have truly realized how, in today’s world, a business can only exist because the internet exists. For example, in the hotel industry, a business can consider how to use the Internet to enhance service and differentiate the hotel service it offers only after conceiving of itself as an internet company. Similarly, someone running a convenience store must think about what types of services a convenience store should provide in a world with the Internet. Under this driving force, the pace of change in the competitive environment is extremely fast, to the point of undermining what we’d imagined. In the past business ventures routinely claimed to aspire to sustainable operations and a solid enduring business and so had to increase their competitive advantage. Those objectives have all been overturned; now we talk about cross-border competition and business integration. Enterprises themselves cannot even be sure who their competitors are anymore—how can they speak of unshakeable foundations?

Ecosystem Platforms: The Elegy for Perpetual Business ModelsWhy do I say that? I’ll use Alibaba as an example to illustrate the importance of building digital ecosystems. In the past, customers thought of Alibaba as an e-commerce company, but today the Alibaba Group encompasses Tmall, Taobao, and Alipay. What a digital ecosystem does is eliminates the demarcation between you and your upstream and downstream suppliers. Even more, demarcation is eliminated between you and society, and even boundaries between countries, and as a result, competition can quickly spread across many different sectors. For example, will Alibaba become a competitor to banks? The evidence seems to suggest as much: today Alipay provides services that in the past were reserved to banks.

To further illustrate the point, in June 2015 the World Economic Forum invited 197 industry and innovative leaders in the finance industry to hold talks about financial technology and carry out a 15-month long research project. The research resulted in a 178-page report that described the future of financial technology. Among the items in the report was one about how payment services push forward and promote a world without cash. Not by coincidence, in January 2016 the government of Denmark was pioneering a plan to stop using cash.

So, while the world is changing so fast, in the past it was common to analyze competitors using Porter’s five forces analysis or to use SWOT analysis in order to determine core strengths, whereas today disruptive innovation and borderless competition has surpassed what we could have imagined and become impossible to predict, and it is difficult to talk about an enduring core business anymore. Speaking from a strategic perspective, the typical strategies we helped clients draw up in the past to help them stay competitive are no longer practicable; what we create today are called instant competitiveness strategies, and their purpose is to help strengthen clients’ flexibility and resilience when meeting and adapting to changes in the market and to be able to respond quickly.

Innovate or DieLooking back, it wasn’t long ago that the venerable Japanese company Sharp was about to be bought out by Foxconn Electronics Inc. and the businesses behind the worldwide brands Sony and Toshiba were dimmed by clouds of bankruptcy. I believe that in the last 20 years Japanese companies have been to slow to innovate relative to European and American businesses. When it comes to innovation, constantly seeking out the best customer-oriented solutions throughout the process of operation is usually a more feasible way to innovate than trying to discrete innovative ideas, big or small, into solutions and then marketing them. When a business must increase its speed of innovation in order to respond

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to changes in the external environment, it faces a multi-dimensional challenge to its organization, human talent, products, and sales channels.

Using human resources as an example, according to the report “Talent 2021” we released in partnership with Oxford Economics, the 2021 worldwide labor market will manifest an excess of highly skilled workers in developing countries such as India, countries in South America, and Mexico, while at the same time presenting shortages of highly skilled workers in developed economies such as those of the United States, Canada, South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan.

Further, according to the Willis Towers Watson “2014 Global Talent Management and Rewards Study,” which surveyed 1,600 businesses and 32,000 employers, of the employers interviewed, 65% said they could not find top-performers, and 64% said they could not find high-potential employees. However, the survey results also showed that employers underestimated the importance of job security and career development opportunities for recruiting and retaining high-performing and high-potential employees, which held their companies back from being able to innovate at a rate to keep up with the pulse of the market.

The Story of Microbusinesses - Large Platforms and Small Front-EndsWhat is a business to do? Whether in the West or mainland china, the Internet is the fundamental infrastructure of business. Through the consumer-to-business (C2B) model consumers are driving production to be more flexible and are changing the face of traditional industry. Today, organizations are manifest simultaneously in two different forms: the large platform and the small front-end. This sort of concept has been even more widely publicized in mainland China in the phrase “large platform, small front end, rich ecosystem.” The meaning behind this is that companies flexibly exploit the two different forms and use them to support each other in order to

construct an ecosystem with competitive advantage.

What is a large platform? It is simply a department established by an organization to meet functional requi rements . What i s a smal l f ront -end? Organizations will start to put together many creative small front-ends to meet the individual needs of customers, and these are also called “mic robus ine s se s . ” These two fo rms a r e typical organizational structures. In the past, if microbusiness-like structures came up in business organizations, they were usually teams established for temporary special projects that would be disbanded at the completion of the project. In the Internet Plus era, however, microbusinesses are the sources of creativity in large companies that satisfy the needs of customers.

I’ll use the example of mainland China’s Haier to explain. If you hear the name of Haier, your impression of the company will probably be stuck on its image as one of the world’s top five major appliance manufacturers. Well, I’m sorry, but that was the Haier of twenty years ago. Today’s Haier is an Internet Plus, Industry Plus, Home Appliances Plus company; its vision and mission is to bring people a better life through the Internet. Haier encourages its employees to be makers, and all can become a CEO. These makers can themselves seek out suitable members from within the organization to form microbusinesses and develop marketable products and serve customers and meet their needs themselves. Haier has already formed 212 such microbusinesses—like 212 different companies, but all existing within the Haier platform and ecosystem. I’ll explain with the example of gaming developer ThundeRobot. Originally, a maker at Haier felt that all the games on the market were not very fun, so he approached Haier and asked to form a microbusiness for gaming development. Today that microbusiness produces over 100 million RMB in value of output per year. The young leader of this microbusiness was promoted into a CEO worth over 100 million. So, Haier will sell anything and

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create anything. Further, Haier’s factories have undergone a transformation in order to provide its microbusinesses with virtual factories for high-mix/low-volume and high-volume/low-mix production.

In speaking of how a large platform assists microbusinesses, Haier has a “personal accounting and reward” system that remunerates employees according to the service they provide customers. “Customers” under the system include internal and external customers, and if service in either area is inadequate, the employee will not receive remuneration. Since Haier implemented this organizational transformation the base organization contains only three types of employee: platform owners, microbusinesses, and makers.

Under conditions of instantaneous competition, professionals should master the ability to operate digitally.Photo from Top Photo Group

Instantaneous Strategy: More Flexible and ResilientWhat significance does the example of Haier hold for us? Businesses today require an “instantaneous competitive strategy” because in the face of such a constantly and widely variable environment, it’s difficult for us to formulate an enduring competitive strategy. As strategies change, the organization must also change, and it can no longer hold onto

the traditional pyramid model of operation but must maintain the simultaneous forms of large platform and small front end in order to more flexibly and resiliently satisfy customer needs.

I must say that organizational adjustment is quite urgent. According to World Economic Forum surveys, nearly 40 different types of position are going to disappear in the future. Actually, in my observation, there’s no need to wait for the future: already at the start of this year (2016), the well-known foreign banks Standard Chartered, HSBC, and DBS have all closed their Taiwan branches and laid off their local workers. Why? Because, consumers are used to carrying out financial activities through the internet. Internet banks have replaced over-the-counter service—there no longer exists demand for it!

In the past, our patterns for interacting with customers were through products, service, and consultation, and employees developed their experience through this process with employees contributing more value later in the process as they gain ability. Within this process, staff would develop value vertically within a certain area, and as they gain experience move towards a horizontal application of their skills across consumers and functions. However, when consumers stop needing to visit the bank and can use the internet to make transfers, payments, deposits, and settlements of exchange, the emphasis on improving the over-the-counter service employee’s skillset diminishes. Further, in terms of service, the bank may want the employee to advance to become a financial specialist and sell insurance and financial products, but the consumer can already meet these needs through the internet and so that service is not required, either. All that leaves is making sure that heartfelt service and in-depth consulting expertise is provided when and where necessary, and in such conditions, employee abilities must change in order to maintain strong customer relationships.

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4 Major Skills that Cross 3 Different AreasI’m going to use the “Global Talent 2021” report again to explain what sorts of capabilities employees must have. In this report, we summarized 4 important key abilities that are important for personnel from now into the future:

1. Ability to Think Globally:In an atmosphere of global competition, a person must possess the “333” professional skills. The first “3” is to be able to hold 3 functionally different positions. The second “3” is to be able to cross the market economies of 3 different fields. The third “3” is to be able to cross over 3 different business communities. If a person can possess such experience, he or she will be much better adapted to international culture and will quickly embrace a culture of pluralism.

2. Ability to Think Flexibly:In the era of the explosion of big data, one who possesses the ability to think flexibly is able to simplify the complex and determine what information is critical.

3. Ability to Operate Digitally:In the face of the Internet Plus platform revolution, a professional who possesses the ability to operate digitally will be able to make appropriate connections within the business’s operations and then be able to realize them to create business opportunities.

4. Ability to Deepen RelationshipsIn an era where the online and offline converge, the internet is of course changing customers’ patterns of behavior, they certainly have needs beyond the virtual platform and will still have a desire to come to a physical location. Professionals should fully exploit opportunities for customer interaction and perform well and utilize their professional skills to provide a warm service experience and assist customers in meeting their virtual platform needs.

Succession Tradition: Global Talent Without BordersI must emphasize an impor tant point : the professionals of 2021 must have 4 great abilities that are already different from what we had imagined. Won’t there be even more changes 5 or 10 years later? There certainly will be. So, I need to supplement and say that in addition to the 4 key abilities, the most important is an ability to learn. I greatly revere what the greatest sage and teacher Confucius said, that one must become a person who treats learning as a joy.

Because, now when we talk about innovation, it’s not just in terms of individuals but about teams. Teams are diverse, diverse in such ways as sex, age, personality, and professional background. I’ll give a practical example to explain. Once I went with a young companion around 30 years old to visit a business that wanted to get involved in mobile commerce. We divided up the work so that I was responsible for explaining strategy, and my young colleague would explain the applications of mobile commerce. After the meeting, the founder told me that because my partner and I were able to support each other and show creativity on a solid practical foundation despite our belonging to different generations, we were more likely to avoid mistakes. The reason this incident left such a deep impression on me was because all the current changes in strategy, platforms, organization, and human resources are certainly not gradually evolved from the old ways that leaders at the table were accustomed to but rather come from adoption of sudden changes. If leaders have not practically experienced this or try it then it’s very difficult to imagine. So, I always exhort leaders and warn them that it’s already too late to think about whether preparing for succession will be difficult; the real question to consider now is, should it happen or not? If they think it’s something that has to be done, then how hard can it be?

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On the other hand, many people worry that in the last few years Taiwan’s own talent has been continuously lured away or poached. According to my observations, it’s true that we are not as good as other countries when it comes to providing work opportunities, chances to demonstrate personal excellence, or competitive compensation. However, considered from another angle, in the era of cross-industry integration, the geographical location of talent is not as important as it used to be. I’ll give an example from my own company to explain. For many years, our U.S. CEO has promoted an innovation plan called “Fellowship.” Under the plan, after the company designates matters and guidelines for innovation, the employees of the company’s branches around the world propose implementable innovation plans according to their own specialties. An employee from our Asia-Pacific region participated in one of the innovation plans and because that innovation team had superior performance and directly increased the value of the company’s stock it eventually led to the formation of a new business group. My point is that the quests for innovation speed and strength are not comparable between generations: in the age of the Internet a succession tradition appears even more important and necessary.

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Gogoro Mobilizes Its Gang of InnovatorsHow Riding an Electric Scooter Became Fashionable and Green

Gogoro firmly believes that good design and service can change the world through a product. With an emphasis on green energy, Gogoro aim to change people’s energy usage habits, and at the same time to make the cities where they live cleaner, more convenient, and smarter. In addition to conveying good values, its electric scooters integrate with riders’ lifestyles and have become a fashion icon overnight, coming forward as a real way to help the planet.

Interview Author: Su Mei-zhen

In order to save money on rent, A-Zhe rented a bedsit in a less glamorous part of our city. The room was located on the first floor of a multi-unit building, and only a wall separated his room from the space where everyone parked their motorcycles. Every day, from the early morning until the middle of the night, he heard the sound of motors as neighbors from the same building arrived or left. He couldn’t bear the disturbance, particularly when some residents would, in an attempt at machismo, modify their exhaust pipes to make an earth-shaking noise. Even worse was the smell of exhaust that assaulted his nose when he stepped outside. As he left for work every morning with soot on his face, A-Zhe could only repeatedly curse these careless scooter riders.

Imagine another scene in my city, meeting with friends in a quiet residential neighborhood to enjoy some tea on a Sunday afternoon. Pedestrians contentedly stroll through adjacent alleys, some walking dogs. A sleek electric scooter glides past to a nearby battery exchange station. The rider smoothly switches out the two batteries in his scooter for a new set. He opens an app on his phone to receive an achievement badge, and then he is back on the road. Although the scooter comes into the line of sight of the people on the street, it does nothing to disturb the quiet of the lane, living up to the poet’s description, “Lightly I leave, as lightly I came.” Before long, riding a scooter may be so elegant.

Commerce 4.0 Makes Life More ExcitingAll kinds of creative services springing up in the wake of the high-tech economy have changed the face of consumer markets and created an all-new lifestyle. Gogoro is certainly not the first company to market electric scooters, but by developing connectivity between its app and its scooters, it has changed the face of the electric scooter market. Gogoro’s battery system brings consumers, scooter retailers, and the scooter manufacturers together in a closer relationship and has completely upended the traditional scooter marketing model. The two batteries on each of Gogoro scooter contain 80 sensors that record ride time, route taken, and the condition of the scooter. Gogoro uses the vast amounts of data collected to determine how long the average scooter rider goes between battery changes and average weekly mileage ridden. It then analyzes those data to determine how many battery exchange stations are required on a given segment of road. Gogoro provides a fine example of using big data to provide precision service. You could also say that the actual product is not the core of the company but that the follow-on service is the highlight! These days everyone carries smart devices, and scooter owners can log on to the app and not only check their battery status, access navigation tools, or reserve batteries at nearby battery exchange stations, but as soon as an irregularity is detected in the condition of the scooter, both the mobile phone and battery station screens will display a warning in order to prevent traffic accidents.

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Currently, over 162 battery exchange stations are already spread across Taipei, Keelung, and Hsinchu. Densely populated urban cores average one station per kilometer of road, and the number of stations is constantly expanding. “Every Gogoro scooter is exclusive to its owner and one-of-a-kind,” says Gogoro public relations manager Jessica Chuang. The more a scooter owner relates to a scooter’s exterior parts, color, and mileage, the more deeply he or she will feel an emotional connection with the product.

Achievement Badges Make Collecting Rewards for Scooter Riding Fun and Easy “Can riding a scooter be turned into something fun?” asks Chuang. She explains that after the Gogoro executive team posed this question, the public began to put their heads together and brainstormed around the question of “how to make riding a scooter more fun.” Members from different industries proposed all sorts of different possibilities, and finally the method of “badge collection” was unanimously approved, and the idea was extended to incorporate badges with many different meanings.

Chuang gives an example to explain: after riding their first 100 kilometers, scooter owners earn an achievement badge. The first time they reserve a battery for swapping they get a “Beauty Betrothed” badge. If they swap batteries between 11:00 p.m. and 1:00 a.m., they receive a “Dracula” badge. The badge system is designed not just to help the firm be aware of the quantity of spare batteries to prepare but also to encourage consumers to avoid peak times and swap their batteries during slow hours. “At this stage we have about 5 thousand scooter owners and around 5 million kilometers ridden,” says Chuang. “In order to enhance our contact with customers, Gogoro will introduce a new badge for every million kilometers ridden.”

The Transformation of Scooters into Fashion IconsWhen it comes to land area and the number of people inhabiting that land, Taiwan holds the crown for most number of scooters per square kilometer, at twice the scooter density of second-place Thailand. Why is everyone willing to live in such an exhaust-filled and noisy place? Since electric scooters have been on the market for a long time, Gogoro has deeply pondered why they failed to take off commercially and discovered three reasons: 1) limited speed, 2) poor appearance, and 3) limited travel distance. Chuang says that according to Gogoro’s market research, 70-80% of scooter owners in Taiwan ride 125cc scooters, and electric scooters in cities typically only have power equivalent to 50ccs. The studies also found that people’s impression of both the speed and appearance of electric scooters was stuck on the image of the old scooters that placed more of an emphasis on quotidian usages such as buying vegetables from the shops than on aesthetics or design. Current scooters run out of electricity after 40-50 kilometers, which limits the distance they can travel, and recharging takes 3-4 hours—no wonder such inconvenience and homeliness have not interested the public!

In order to shake off that image, one of Gogoro’s founding goals was a breakthrough in horsepower delivery and a way to increase riding time. Their scooters’ top speed now pushes 110 kilometers per hour and only requires 6 seconds for a recharge. Additionally, the majority of scooter riders are young people, so the scooters’ styling cannot appear too plain. In addition to utilizing combinations of differently textured materials and creating a simply elegant, extremely futuristic design style, Gogoro observed a close relationship between typical consumers and their knowledge of cars and car brands, and so they decided to use brand stories and models to create an image through which owners could express their style. For example, someone who buys a Mazda might be inclined

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toward Japanese products and be more meticulously minded, whereas an owner of a BMW is typically a young CEO. Jessica Chuang explains, “Since we have this many scooters running out on the road every day, why don’t we [also] use this as an opportunity to make them more connected to our lives and a part of cultural trends?” In order to be able to precisely target customers by the feel of their unique lifestyles, Gogoro provides customizable services: customers can choose from and switch out different body panels, seats, instrument panels, and even sounds that the taillights make. Today, riding a Gogoro does not just convey environmental consciousness—it has gradually become more an expression of personal taste.

Never Say No – The Great Achievement of Gogoro’s Innovation GangGogoro puts an intense focus on finding the right people when it comes to recruitment. This explains why the core leadership team includes more than a few people who worked with CEO Horace Luke (陸學森 ) during his time at HTC. They all understand Luke’s philosophy of action, and after a while one would bring in another companion who fits with the philosophy. Jessica Chuang tells people an interesting story: last year in March, a few days after the Xinyi flagship store opened, Luke went there one evening after work to see how it was running. While there, he happened to overhear a gentleman in the process of explaining to his girlfriend the principles behind the Gogoro batteries and their uses, and he went over and struck up a conversation. After chatting for a minute, Luke invited the man to join his team: “I think you should come work at our company.” Today this gentleman is a green energy researcher for Gogoro. This shows how Gogoro seeks “the right people,” valuing unique opportunities of chance in addition to the traditional recruitment channels. Chuang says, “After the right people join, the right kind of culture will naturally develop—they grow together. The most important thing is that they share the same philosophy.” She explains that when a business is recruiting, it is

essential that it searches for people who share the company’s philosophy. This is particularly true in the case of startups, where constant and recurring discussion takes place in the initial stage and people brought on must understand and be able to accept that the scope of future operations needs to flexible and adaptive. Gogoro certainly does not weigh age or past experience particularly heavily; Horace Luke often uses the phrase “Never say no” to encourage his company colleagues. Daring to make breakthroughs and disregard the conventional framework, Gogoro willingly provides young people chances to perform as well as the space to fail as they learn.

Embracing talent from industries as varied as communications, computers, consumer electronics, IT, and clothing, the diverse Gogoro core team puts their heads together to produce ideas to answer the question, “What features should a life-style scooter be equipped with?” Only by gathering people from so many different backgrounds are they able to come up with so many and such different ideas. The previously mentioned system of badge collection, for example, was proposed by a colleague who had worked at an internet game company. Without the stimulation resulting from the collision of different strains of thought, perhaps it would be even more difficult to break through and change consumers’ habits and ways of using scooters—maybe Gogoro wouldn’t be as it is today.

The Sharing Economy Is Collaborative Rivalry, not CompetitionGogoro has overturned the linear business model of electric scooters; could competition emerge from within the industry? Jessica Chuang says that in an era of no borders, rivals in the marketplace are no longer as distinct as they used to be; potential rivalry will not necessarily come from within industry. There exists an idea of collaborative rivalry, and companies must focus on this rivalry together with the “sharing economy.”

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“Think about when Google first wanted to create an autonomous vehicle,” says Chuang. “If they weren’t willing to cooperate with companies like Ford or Volkswagen, they would have to go to the internet to find personnel with a deep knowledge of automobile manufacturing.” Chuang also gives the example of her old employer, Microsoft: in the past, Microsoft’s Windows operating system was closed off, and the company had absolutely no desire for their software to work together with Apple’s operating system. However, in the last few years Microsoft has emphasized openness, pushing many products like Microsoft Office for Mac to allow Mac users to also use the Office suite. They realized that the user base and the market have already reached a certain level of saturation and that if the only way to achieve new breakthroughs is to change their perspective and view competitive rivals of the past as partners with whom they can collaborate. Only by doing this can they bring their products to more customers.

Gogoro’s original intent was to create an energy platform. Since that task is mostly accomplished, the system can only achieve its maximum level of performance as more people join and enough data can be obtained to lead to improvement in transportation policy. “In the past competition was hostile; today rivalry is collaborative,” says Chuang. “In today’s world, if you don’t cooperate with others and insist on doing everything by yourself, the time, labor, and capital cost will be simply too much to bear.” Only by adopting an open attitude and cooperating with others can businesses focus on their own work and specialties. Chuang believes that seeing everyone as enemies will not only wear one out, but will also lead to a continual increase in the number of enemies.

Where to Next?In addition to carrying out its plans for the central and southern cities and continual deployment of battery exchange stations across Taiwan, Gogoro is planning expansion into a metropolitan area further afield: Amsterdam, the capital of the Netherlands. Whether over price, performance, cargo space, or personal privacy, public discussions of Gogoro over the last year include a mix of positive and negative evaluations. This shows the risk inherent in innovation: consumers will inevitably feel some fear of the unknown as they encounter new products and consumption models, and Gogoro must continue to confront and overcome this challenge into the future. Gogoro firmly believes that good design and service can change the world through a product; its resolve to change the world and the energy it invests toward that end deserve our continued attention.

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iCHEF Information Consulting IncorporatedAn App for a New Era of Restaurateurship – A Smart Point of Sale System Takes on the

Daily Bustle of the Restaurant Business

iCHEF has developed a world-class product: the strongest restaurant point of service app. Their one app can handle customer queuing, seating and ordering, taste customization, serving of food, receipt generation, and tax reporting. The app enables small companies to do big business and in the future will use big data analysis to reveal the implicit rules of opening a restaurant and incorporate them into an automated cloud-based tool that will make it easier to succeed in opening a restaurant.

Interview Compiler: Lu Yu-juan Photography: Fang Jun-zhe

Customer: Sir, I want an oyster omelet, but with no oyster!Customer: Sir, I want an oyster omelet, with no eggs!Customer: Sir, I want miso soup, with pork balls!Customer: I want pork ball soup with eggs!Small restaurant owner: Miso soup without oysters, oyster omelet with pork balls but no eggs?Customer: It’s miso soup with the pork balls, and put eggs in the oyster omelet but not oyster!Small restaurant owner: *sigh*…

Sound tiring? Owning or serving in a restaurant is exhausting! Working in the industry seems to require a superhuman ability to do so much at once: arranging customer seating, remembering complex menus, taking orders, remembering individual preferences (extra onions, no garlic, no celery, extra parsley, no MSG, less oil, less salt, not spicy, a little spicy, moderately spicy, very spicy, more broth, less broth, add rice, add noodles, more sugar and less ice, less sugar and more ice, no sugar and no ice—so many trifling demands that they cannot possibly all be prepared for in advance), the order in which to bring out food, the speed at which to bring out food, calculation of the bill… Other than drinking an energy drink, what is the proprietor of a small restaurant or members of the waitstaff to do? The iChef point of service app enables small restaurants to do big business in an orderly and methodical way.

Established in April 2012, iCHEF Information Consulting Inc. is a restaurant technology company that focuses on serving restaurant entrepreneurs. In addition to providing both a convenient and effective point of service app and iPad based comprehensive POS solution, it has also created a community and forum for the foodservice industry to increase communication among restaurateurs and make opening restaurants into a better business.

iCHEF co-founder and chief marketing officer Ken Chen explains, “Traditional point of sale (POS) systems just go ‘ding’ and open the cash drawer. They will add up a few thousand dollars and only allow you to order food and calculate the bill. We developed an iPad POS app specifically for restaurants that can complete the whole service process—from queueing and seating customers, to customizing their preferences, serving food, and printing the receipt and reporting taxes—all in one app.”

A Professional Gang of FourThe story of iCHEF’s founding begins with beef noodles. Chief operating officer Sean Hsu was formerly chief operating officer at the President Chain Store Corp. with responsibility for the PLAZA brand of Japanese products. After leaving PCSC, he founded his own beef noodle restaurant, Mazendo. Because of his creative touch, Mazendo became popular and very busy. iCHEF Chief

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operating officer Benjamin Wu, who had formerly worked under Hsu at PLAZA, followed him to Mazendo to help out.Eventually, Mazendo was renovated to better accommodate the growing crowds of customers. The original point of sale equipment occupied quite a bit of space, and Hsu wanted to break free of the traditional cashiering system and free up some space for customers, so he began considering mobile POS systems. “We evaluated four different tablet POS systems from overseas,” he explains, “but we discovered that the way those international systems functioned did not fit the environment of rapid table turnover in Taiwan, and—more importantly—they did not support an electronic invoicing system, so they could not interface with Taiwan’s tax receipt system.” “Finally, I decided to write one myself.” Benjamin Wu looked up his old high school buddies who had been fellow members of the Song Shan high school computer club. At the time, now-chief technology officer Spencer Ho was an engineer at UCLA, and chief marketing officer Ken Chen was serving as McDonald’s director of menu strategy for greater China. Wu called them to return and start a business together, and thus were the positions for an iron triangle of operations, technology, and marketing set. Hsu had a background in retail and stressed optimum operating efficiency; Ho strived to push the limits of technology; and Wu had a precise sense for sales numbers. Chen was proficient in the planning and execution of all types of marketing strategies. Their complementary talents created a solid leadership lineup for the startup.

CTO Ho was responsible for direct ing the development of the iCHEF iPad POS app. He decided to use the iPad for all terminal functions. One iPad would be the master, and additional iPads could access the system through the restaurant’s local Wi-Fi network, and when the internet connection was strong, the system would upload data to a cloud-based back-end system that would

serve for tax invoicing and data analysis and reporting applications.

“It sounds simple, but doing it was actually very difficult,” recalls Chen. “The technical requirements for a mobile restaurant management system are greater than those for a typical line of service because every second of every minute of every day is critical in the foodservice industry, and it cannot bear the briefest interruption of system service. When it first went online there was a huge crash, and we slept at Mazendo for a week until we fixed the problem.” He says that it took a full 8 months of continually learning from mistakes, constantly making corrections, and improving the technical quality and stability of the system before it was operating stably.

Aspiring to Become the Ikea of POS SystemsDevelopment of the iCHEF app began in April 2012 and, because of the difficulty involved, was not ready for commercialization and sale until May 2013, when a business model had to be chosen. Subsequently, iCHEF entered a period of stable growth. It targets small- and medium-sized restaurant businesses and currently has accumulated over 1 thousand subscribing businesses, and each pays a monthly fee of NT$1950.

Ken Chen explains, “To use the iCHEF POS app, a restaurant only needs an iPad, a receipt printer, and a wireless network. No computer is required, and the hardware costs are 30% lower than for traditional POS systems. It also increases worker productivity by 30% and lowers labor requirements by 20% and has proven to be an excellent tool for opening small- and medium-sized restaurants. Last year 2 out of 10 new restaurants that opened used the iCHEF POS app, and most of our new restaurant clients sought us out.”Chen stresses that, “Our great strength is our deep familiarity with the specific needs of the restaurant industry. Small- and medium-sized restaurants have

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direct and immediate needs, and anything that does not meet those needs will simply not be used. We spent a lot of time trying to understand how we could really help restaurateurs. He says that the core value of iCHEF is that it resolves the practical problems of operating a restaurant and increases productivity. Currently the app includes features for table management, rapid ordering of complex menu combinations, automatic calculation of discounts, one-button bill splitting, and tableside credit card payment.

“We hope to become the Ikea of POS systems and create a platform that will enable restaurateurs to complete the entire system set-up process on their own and meet the requirements of their restaurant workflow,” explains Kai Cheng. “We want to enable restaurateurs to independently create their own functionalities according to their restaurants’ unique workflow and create a customizable platform at minimal cost.” He explains that in this way iCHEF can spare restaurateurs a lot of trivial tasks and allow them to focus more on developing their restaurants’ unique style and character rather than wasting energy on administrative processes.

Numerous awards confirm the value of the powerful and feature-rich iCHEF POS app and its status as a world-class product. iCHEF won the judges’ prize at the 2014 Echelon Tokyo Satellite startup competition. In 2015 it won Germany’s Red Dot Award and Japan’s Good Design Award. Most noteworthy, in 2016 it won Germany’s iF gold award. “Our innovative process design allowed us to win this prestigious award and is something to be quite proud of,” says Chen confidently.

Partnering with Restaurants for Long-Term GrowthiCHEF turns the one-time sale business model inside out by assisting restaurant owners through long-term growth; it helps them stay close to customers, increase revenue, and reduce costs. First, they put great effort into building a community

of businesspeople. In July 2014, they started a restaurant owners’ club which has since grown into the largest restaurant operators’ club in Taiwan, drawing attendance from over a hundred different restaurants to monthly meetings. Second, they started the blog “Just Love to Open a Restaurant” ( 就愛開餐廳 ) for those thinking about entering the industry, and they also organize seminars about iCHEF primarily for restaurateurs in order to make connections and increase opportunities for cooperation.

Through such contact with restaurant owners, iCHEF discovered that the relatively small size of many restaurants raised their food and consumables purchasing costs and that many restaurateurs did not have time for purchasing but relied on suppliers to deliver their products. In response, iCHEF developed a joint procurement system for small restaurants, which, by combining their forces, gives them the bargaining power of large chain restaurants. iCHEF also created an online shopping mall for members with 1-5% lower than market prices to help restaurant owners reduce costs, solve cash flow problems, and ease the pressure of procurement.

In 2014, iCHEF partnered with CTBC Bank to provide a tableside credit card payment service. It uses the iPad’s iBeacon technology and a Bluetooth connection with customers’ mobile phones to allow all CTBC card members to pay their bill with a mobile app. “If iCHEF’s thousands of member restaurants can work with the bank at the same time, they suddenly have a lot more room to cooperate with the financial institution on such services as supply chain financing and restaurant loans,” adds Ken Chen.

Since receiving an investment of US$1.5 million from Pxmart chairman Lin Ming-Hsiung, the company raised another US$5.6 million in capital in mid-2015 which was designated to fund technological development and the opening of

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overseas markets. Currently iCHEF has subsidiary companies in Singapore and Hong Kong and plans to spread its service and business model to even more countries and cities.

The Potential Power of a Little Universe of DataiChef does not aspire only to sell its POS app. Ken Chen enthusiastically poses the question, “What could we achieve if we could capture everything going on in the restaurant and analyze that data?” Effective exploitation of big data is iCHEF’s next goal.

Chen explains, “Every month the iCHEF POS app platform processes the data for 2 million transactions and serves 3 million restaurant customers. In two years it has recorded the serving of 100 million dishes, as well as every event and every transaction, catching and storing these data. Although the data is there, we would most like to figure out how to digest it and analyze it to generate valuable insight.”

But, Chen also stresses, “Just because our platform is recording customer information does not mean that we have the authority to use it. The right to use the information belongs to customers, and we must obtain customers’ consent for our cooperation and use of the information in any research project.”

Currently, iCHEF is allied with Microsoft, the Sun Spark Group, and the Institute of Service Science at National Tsing Hua University to carry out the “Small Restaurant, Big Data” research project. The project uses Microsoft’s Azure machine learning tool to analyze and make predictions from data gathered through the iCHEF POS app at Sun Spark Group’s Tino’s Pizza restaurants. It seeks to use these data and tools to uncover the implicit rules of restaurant operation and use them to develop an automated operations tool that will create the optimal restaurant business model.

Microsoft strives to help businesses expand their business opportunities through cloud services.Photo from Nengli Magazine

Microsoft helps small businesses position themselves advantageously for cloud-based business opportunities.Photo from Nengli Magazine

Microsoft Taiwan COO and sales group vice president Zhou Wangtun, who is involved with the project, clarifies, “In the past when we’d talk about big data, everyone would assume that only big companies must have big data. In reality, small companies also have big data, and they don’t even need to produce it—it’s hidden everywhere.” Chen believes that “There should not be such a high barrier to the analysis and application of big data, and it should be integrated into a platform for convenient utilization.”

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Zhou Wangtun further explains, “The little universe of data contained within a restaurant is not limited to the numbers on a revenue sheet. There are over 40 data points behind every transaction recorded [by the POS app], including such information as taste preferences, which personnel handled the food, and the wait time. If a restaurant had 100 groups of customers a day, then in one year it would produce 1 million data points with over 2 trillion ways to correlate them—a number ten times greater than the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy. An ability to analyze the connections among these data points and the significance behind them would certainly help restaurant owners improve their operations and effectively raise levels of customer satisfaction.”

He continues, “The iCHEF POS app uses a complete information structure to record the mountains of data generated by restaurant operation. An international research team from the Institute of Service Science then uses the advanced Microsoft Azure cloud tool to research and analyze that data. They analyze user behavior and habits and predict future customer behavior and trends in order to build predictive behavior models and maintain a full accounting of consumer preferences, as well as to plan out the best times, locations and manners for customer interaction to optimize operations and service. They use big data to gain an all-new perspective on how to open and run a restaurant.”

Ken Chen concludes, “The ultimate goal of this research is to find out more of the implicit rules of opening up a restaurant and then develop those into an automated cloud-based tool so that restaurateurs can be profitable just by using iCHEF’s POS app. We hope to be able to better turn data into business opportunities and make it easier to succeed starting out in the restaurant industry.”

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