|
The March 2004 issue of MIT's Technology Review magazine contains a fascinating article by Michael Schrage entitled Disruptive Incrementalism. It explains how incremental changes in products and services can sometimes lead to major successes.
"While technically less innovative then the shifts from, say, pistons to jet engines or vacuum tubes to transistors, disruptive incremental innovations have profound effects on business. It's not about simply extending a brand; it's about surprisingly cheap, surprisingly easy-to-implement ideas that transform how value is created or perceived. The ideas underlying the successful incremental disruptor almost always seem blindingly obvious In retrospect. Any competitor could have done it."
A case in point: Most people don't consider the Apple iMac's eye-popping designed to be innovative. But customers do, and that's what matters. Customers who buy iMacs consider the outward appearance of their computer to be very important, and in this context, Apple's breakthrough product designs are helping it to stand out from the dozens of manufacturers of "beige box" PCs.
Other examples cited by Schrage included Dilbert creator Scott Adams' decision to put his e-mail address in his comic strips, as a way to solicit reader feedback and ideas for future strips, and James Dyson's clever idea in 1993 to make the housings of his novel cyclonic vacuum cleaner transparent -- so customers could see how well their machines were working.
Of course, not every innovation or new product improvement is destined to have the same far-reaching impact as the three examples cited in this article. But it's clear that opportunities for disruptive incrementalism are all around us, if only we open our eyes to the fact that "even small revolutions can have disproportionately big results." |
