Good enough at radically lower prices — disruptive innovation

I recommend reading a short article about disruptive innovation in MIT’s Technology Review magazine of Jan/Feb 2012 — “The Empires Strike Back” by Scott D. Anthony and Clayton M. Christensen. An online version is here. They define disruptive innovation as “making the complicated simple, making the expensive affordable”, and

We define disruptive technologies as those that offer “good enough” solutions to new groups of consumers, often at radically lower prices.

But “technologies” should be broadly understood here to include radical business models, such as Apple’s iTunes and App Stores, or Amazon’s e-books via Kindle.

Driving disruption requires moving beyond purely technological innovation to consider new ways of creating, capturing, and delivering value.

The big guys often focus too long on their high-end, high-margin products, as the disruptive technology steadily improves, and eventually eats their lunches. Startups are still the source of the majority of such disruptions, but the historical trend has been for more big guys to be sources of disruption themselves. The focus of the article is noticing that the trend has accelerated significantly since 2000. And the big guys are learning to see the threats from startups, too.

If you’re an entrepreneur and your strategy assumes that the market-leading incumbent will ignore you, you ought to rethink your business plan. [...] Entrepreneurs who are dead set on defeating market leaders should consider novel ways to work with them instead.

A key tactic of market leaders who successfully disrupt is to search for profit in developing economies.

Winning in emerging markets often requires lower prices and different business models — two hallmarks of disruption.

That tactic works from the learning required to achieve the goal. It’s a mistake to manage the baby-steps of disruptive innovations the same way you’d manage a mature, high-margin product.

Over the last decade IBM’s Emerging Business Opportunities (EBO) program has helped the company succeed in new markets like blade servers and networked data storage. One key is not judging new technology solely on its potential financial return. Instead, IBM evaluates the success of its EBO teams primarily according to whether managers learn from early failure and make adjustments in response.

Maybe the ultimate key is to stop focusing on what you’re good at and comfortable with, your so-called “core competencies”, and start getting good at whatever customers, and potential customers, want. A great quote from Amazon’s Jeff Bezos

If you want to really continually revitalize the service you provide the customer, you can’t stop at ‘What are we good at?’ You have to ask, ‘What do our customers need and want?’ And no matter how hard it is, you better get good at those things.

Anthony and Christensen observe

Pushing boundaries helps companies spot disruptive signals early — especially if they pay attention to new competitors that serve customers who were previously ignored.

The meaning in our mistake

According to Jonah Lehrer in his excellent “Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up“

Dunbar found that most new scientific ideas emerged from lab meetings, those weekly sessions in which people publicly present their data. Interestingly, the most important element of the lab meeting wasn’t the presentation — it was the debate that followed. Dunbar observed that the skeptical (and sometimes heated) questions asked during a group session frequently triggered breakthroughs, as the scientists were forced to reconsider data they’d previously ignored. [...] a single bracing query was enough to turn scientists into temporary outsiders, able to look anew at their own work.

[Discussion of two labs facing the same experimental problem, but one lab diverse, the other not.]

The diverse lab, in contrast, mulled the problem at a group meeting. [...] “After another 10 minutes of talking, the protein problem was solved,” Dunbar says. “They made it look easy.”

When Dunbar reviewed the transcripts of the meeting, he found that the intellectual mix generated a distinct type of interaction in which the scientists were forced to rely on metaphors and analogies to express themselves. (That’s because [the diverse] lab lacked a specialized language that everyone could understand.) These abstractions proved essential for problem-solving, as they encouraged the scientists to reconsider their assumptions. Having to explain the problem to someone else forced them to think, if only for a moment, like an intellectual on the margins, filled with self-skepticism.

This is why other people are so helpful: They shock us out of our cognitive box. “I saw this happen all the time,” Dunbar says. “A scientist would be trying to describe their approach, and they’d be getting a little defensive, and then they’d get this quizzical look on their face. It was like they’d finally understood what was important.”

What turned out to be so important, of course, was the unexpected result, the experimental error that felt like a failure. The answer had been there all along — it was just obscured by the imperfect theory, rendered invisible by our small-minded brain. It’s not until we talk to a colleague or translate our idea into an analogy that we glimpse the meaning in our mistake.

Fast forward — how to overcome socially imposed life slowness?

Think big, move fast, and make some mistakes.

Easier said than done. Sure, you can and should build in mechanisms to detect mistakes fast, too. But the harder problem is that when you slip into that mode, the people around you start moving in slo-mo, or so it feels, and you start to annoy them and they start to annoy you.

It’s a rare person that can resist the spell of their little village. So what options are you left with? Sink back into mediocrity? Find a better village? Build your own?

According to William J. Beaty

In his book “Surely You’re Joking…”, R. Feynman experimented with personal time sense, and he wondered what determines it. I think it might be social, not physiology. My first summer job was raking leaves on Elmira College campus, and it quickly became apparent that my normal rate of work was wrong. I did things much faster than the seasoned workers, and I attracted funny looks, so I adjusted my performance. I thought it was sort of stupid; why didn’t everyone rake leaves normally instead of in slow motion? But slow raking was the “way you’re supposed to do it,” and anyone who strayed from the norm would encounter group pressure to slow down. But… that’s how infants become people!!! We change behavior as we encounter immense nonverbal pressure from parents, friends, outsiders, etc., otherwise we’d all behave as one-year-olds even when adult. In different societies the standards are different; I’ve heard that tourists south of the border complain that everyone does everything slowly… and islanders complain about crazy Americans who are always rushing about. WHAT IF HUMAN TIME SENSE IS SOCIETALLY DETERMINED? I’ve experimented with this and find that it is. If I’m alone I can push myself to perform tasks much faster until until “faster” becomes habitual and unnoticed, but I get huge amounts of work done, and it takes forever for the clock to get to lunchtime. It feels like really waking up, at least until it starts being normal. Also, my usual body movements become tiring, and I find it’s much easier to move in curves rather than starting/stopping the considerable mass of limbs. (Like switching to ‘racewalk’ rather than just speeding up my normal walk.) And when I tried it for days at a time, I started losing weight and had to eat extra meals. If I asked someone a question or tried conversing, their slow responses and slow thinking was quite irritating. But whenever I kept all this up in public, people responded badly. They seemed to be thinking “what’s WRONG with that guy? What drug is HE on? Is he insane or something?” Bingo! That’s the societal pressure which usually keeps its members living at the “proper” speed. It’s the same as if I started acting like a 2-yr-old, or if I moved to a country where things happened at different speed: I’d encounter the same type of pressure to adapt. So… I wonder how far this can be pushed. Can we live at 5x normal? Will we get huge amounts of work done, then have a crash from “exhaustion of manic energy” or perhaps die prematurely of old age? Or go the other route and let the outer world speed up to 5x faster while we stay “the same.”

A lot of intriguing speculations there about the social impact on personal time sense, and it’s backed up by real experimental data. I would add — Is there an optimal life speed for provoking creativity? for concentration? for retention of studied material? Does concentration impact life speed? How long does it take a typical person to get in sync with new lifespeed norms after relocating?

In addition to the theoretical/scientific questions raised, it seems to me like there’s a powerful effectiveness tool lurking here.  If you could just find a way to get in fine control of your own lifespeed! — fast-forwarding during a task that is just a means to ends (where the journey itself has little reward), but slo-moing during the good stuff (like enjoying a fine meal or making love).

See also “Life isn’t short“.

Stop just getting things done and start making things happen.

What’s your provocative question?

The USA government’s National Cancer Institute (NCI), recently carried out a “Provocative Questions” project. According to their project page

The provocative questions project is intended to assemble a list of important but non-obvious questions that will stimulate the NCI’s research communities to use laboratory, clinical, and population sciences in especially effective and imaginative ways.

and

A total of 24 Provocative Questions posed during the nationwide Provocative Questions workshops and from website submissions have been selected for inclusion in a Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) “Research Answers to NCI’s Provocative Questions”.

Edge.org, famous for its World Question Center, has the following mission statement

To arrive at the edge of the world’s knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.

What’s your provocative question?

The right way to embed tweets in your WordPress articles

This

[tweet https://twitter.com/skmurphy/status/150308897184428032]
[tweet https://twitter.com/Tzeporah/status/149921466916421633]

yields this

It's the picture on the box that sells the LEGO set.

—
  (@skmurphy) December 23, 2011

Happy Holidays everyone. Top 10 Clean Energy Stories of 2011 (with Charts) clmpr.gs/sBXhGr @thinkprogress #climate #energyrevolution

—
Tzeporah Berman (@Tzeporah) December 22, 2011

Distributed sharing of resources in SystemVerilog — a design pattern

When multiple clients share access to the same resource, it’s good to push much of the access control logic out into the clients, because it reduces communication and can be powered-down with the client.

The control logic is a finite-state machine (FSM), specifically, a finite state transducer, which can be expressed as a combination of three pure functions; let me call them reset, machine, and observe.

STATE s;
INSTR instruction;
always_ff @(posdedge clk or posedge rst)
  if (rst)
    s <= reset()
  else
    s <= machine(s, instruction);
assign out = observe(s);

To ensure support by the lowest common denominator of tools, the functions and types would today be imported from a package, and the instruction type can usually be kept simple; for example, if all you ever need to do is write to a shared register, then an instruction could be as simple as a boolean and a value.

But in the long run, as ever more complex functionality is pushed out to clients, the SystemVerilog-2005 LRM already provides a couple useful constructs that aren’t yet implemented by many tools.

• Functions can be defined in a main module, then exported to the clients via a connecting modport.
• Instructions can be expressed with tagged unions.

Why don’t Silicon Valley roofs wear reflective sun shades in the summer?

In Silicon Valley, it almost never rains during the months that air conditioners are used. There are many acres of commercial roofs here, soaking up the heat of the sun.

I would think that this heat would be a significant factor in the HVAC requirements, reducing the need for heating in the winter and increasing the need for air conditioning in the summer. But maybe that’s not so, for example, maybe the roofs are excellently insulated from the interior.

It would be great if those roofs were using photovoltaic panels to convert the sunlight into electricity, but until then I wonder why facilities in the summer don’t just roll out cheap reflective tarpaulins coated with the same material car owners have propped up behind their windshields/screens in the parking lots below.

This seems so obvious that I think there must be some reason why it isn’t done. But what? If you know, please leave a comment. Thanks!

Bus fabric design in SystemVerilog

If you are a SystemVerilog designer, then I recommend you study a recent short tutorial by my colleague Mahesh Rattehalli, showing a practical methodology for arrays of interfaces.

Creating a Bus Fabric Design in SystemVerilog (Access restricted to Synopsys customers.)

A bus “fabric” or “mesh” is a complex interconnect with its own control logic, such as among an arbiter and an array of client modules.

A key point to keep in mind is that the SystemVerilog standard does not allow the dynamic indexing of arrays of interfaces, but the same effect can be achieved with generates.

Auto-Tune for seniors — unmet market need for everyday electronic voice correction

By now we’re all used to hearing the voices of Western pop musicians made more tuneful with electronic pitch correction.

This same technology, combined with micro-loudspeakers, should be able to assist the elderly, too. Akin to a hearing aid, it would be a speaking aid.

According to John Morenski, answering “Why do elderly people’s voice change into a ‘old persons voice’?“,

The vocal cords in men thin and atrophy with age, resulting in a higher pitched conversational voice. … Some of the changes can result from … attempts to compensate for these changes. Men may develop the “gravelly” voice in an attempt to lower the pitch.

The in-ear feedback could be combined with hearing aids. The actual voice could be masked from others (so that they don’t hear a double voice) with active noise control.

The same system minus the amplified voice correction, and with the hearing aids replaced with simple noise reducing earbuds, would also be useful immediately for mobile telephony. In a busy air terminal or shopping mall, you could speak as loud as you like without disturbing others, and without you or those you’re talking with being disturbed by the ambient noise. And the voice correction might still be useful, even if not required, to make you more easily understood by others on the call, such as by raising the pitch enough to circumvent the low-pass filter.

Even simple volume correction could improve communication quality for those who, perhaps from shyness, tend to speak too softly, and those who, perhaps from hearing loss, tend to speak too loudly.

Longer term, adding more intelligence to the voice correction, I would personally like a speaking aid that would compensate for my often lazy, mumbling enunciation, speaking too much from my throat. Think how much easier it would be to listen to Henry Kissinger if he were using such a device!

A speaking aid could correct for damaged voices (whether throat cancer or just a bad cold), speech impediments, foreign accents, hormone problems, and lazy speech habits like mine. Global call centers could use it to affect different accents, as could actors and those who want to sound posh.

Because of the active noise control, it could even filter out some words entirely, such as, ‘ummm”, “you know”, “like”, and obscenities. Because of the delay, this pruning wouldn’t be audible via the in-ear feedback.

Finally, intelligent hearing aids, phones, cell phones, etc. could build in voice correction to help you understand better what’s being said. For example, if your hearing is only good in a narrow range of frequencies, then why not adjust all of the voices you’re hearing into that range? It might sound odd at first, but you’d get used to it quickly. A global call center could automatically correct the incoming accent into the accent most familiar to the service rep.

Cool your computers by harvesting their heat – business model needed

According to Winston Saunders

Not only should all energy that computes heat as little as possible, but all energy that heats should also compute as much as possible.

and

For instance, near Helsinki’s harbor there’s a data center under the beautiful Orthodox Church which provides some residential district heating. Presumably providing heating in that case offsets the energy costs of the data center.

So is there a business model where providing a compute resource can offset the operating costs of my heater?

For the problems of making this into a business, see this comment by Barry Rountree.

This is yet another case where a carbon tax could help rationalize the economy.