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Breakthroughs to nowhere
December 01, 2005
For companies today, "breakthrough innovation" has become something of a holy grail. But achieving a breakthrough - even a truly momentous one - doesn't guarantee commercial success. Some products that represent great technological advances never gain a profitable place in the market - they're too good for this world. I look at one example - the Concorde SST - in Flying Blind, my latest column on innovation for Strategy & Business. The Concorde's unhappy fate, I argue, tells us something important about how easy it is to misread the dynamics of both technological progress and marketplace change.
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Comments
Nick,
Given the recent exchange between you and Farber on the new disintermediated (word?) media, I'm curious as to how you see your own blog. I notice that you have increased the frequency of postings, but rarely participate in the comment threads. Was that a decision? Just curious.
Posted by: bpr at December 1, 2005 08:01 AM
I am not so sure...I am more in Tom Peter's camp - Innovate or Die...The Chinese and Indians and others have shown they can produce what we can do today cheaper, better. So we have to become more of a moving target. ...some of this will result in breakthrough innovation - some of the effort will just honestly tell us to get the hell out of some products we cannot be competitive in. Instead of continuing to ask "who moved my cheese?" we need to find new cheese... but there will be dead ends, no question...
Posted by: vinnie mirchandani at December 1, 2005 09:56 PM
Yes, I think there are two distinct skill sets in making a technological innovation ubiquitous: inventing the new technology and enticing a mass market to buy it. A couple of examples:
Personal computer graphical user interface:
Invented by... Xerox PARC
Popularized by ... Apple
The gasoline-powered car:
Invented by... George Baldwin Selden (according to your beloved Wikipedia)
Popularized by... Henry Ford
One of the many things that Microsoft is good at is taking well-engineered but hard-to-use technologies and simplifying the user interface and the nomenclature to make them usable by average humans.
Posted by: Bill Higgins at December 1, 2005 11:21 PM
New Scientist magazine has a nice analysis this issue of why the Concorde's fuel inefficiency, noise etc doomed i - and why the next generation super sonic business jets will do better...
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/mech-tech/mg18825271.900
Posted by: Vinnie Mirchandani at December 12, 2005 12:11 AM
The Atlantic article:
Is Google Making Us Stupid?"
Nick's new book:
"Future Shock for the web-apps era" -Fast Company
"Ominously prescient" -Kirkus Reviews
"Riveting stuff" -New York Post
Greatest hits
Avatars consume as much electricity as Brazilians
The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock's avatar
Flight of the wingless coffin fly
Other writing
The end of corporate computing
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