http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

It’s a great talk. I agree that being creative is often more important than being smart, simply because it isn’t nearly as common. I wish formal education focused more on how to ask good questions instead of just how to find the right answer.

As pointed out, the fear of being wrong that gets ingrained in us stifles creativity and risk-taking. Google counteracts this phenomenon in the workforce with their “20% time” policy, under which employees work on experimental, pet projects one day a week. Without strict return on investment expectations, employees are free to explore new ideas. Most of the projects have probably failed, but several have become profitable, the most notable perhaps is the AdSense program.

Also, while I see and accept your point about trying to drive the browser market along with Chrome, I had to chuckle at the reaction to this picture someone from Microsoft would have to this thought.

Lastly, it’s an interesting concept for a third party entity to try to drive product development at another company from the outside. Do you have an example of a situation where something like this was successfully accomplished by an entity other than the government? (Governments accomplish this, for example, by funding basic reseach that can be implemented in commercial products.) And, if Google is really trying to drive Microsoft’s actions from the outside, doesn’t that make it so powerful as to be “scary”. (Thankfully, they “do no evil”.)

First, from your comment I think that you DO agree with me that browsers in general pose a disruptive threat to the traditional OS.

Second, I agree with you that Chrome is not really novel in a technological sense. It represents only an incremental improvement in certain dimensions of browser functionality.

However, remember that Christensen’s full concept of disruptive innovation isn’t about technology at all. It’s about the things that come along and displace incumbents. You are absolutely correct that the browser has long been recognized as that kind of disruptive threat to the OS.

The problem is that, for all their progress and nifty features, the major browsers do not have the capability to handle advanced web-based applications very well for the reasons I mentioned in my post.

My argument is that Chrome may provide the impetus to push those capabilities into browsers that will finally tip the balance in favor the browser as the preferred application platform.

As the owner of a web-based software development firm (http://www.knowligent.com), I can assure you that the current crop of browsers really aren’t powerful enough for the kind of web-based applications that could effectively compete with traditional OS-based applications. Google wants to build those apps (and so do we and a lot of other companies), and they are tired of waiting for the major browsers to “grow-up”.

I doubt that Chrome will prove to be disruptive to the browser “market”, and I don’t think it will, by itself, be directly disruptive to anything else. My argument is that it is likely going to lead to the faster evolution of browsers in general in ultimately making them disruptive to the traditional OS/Application paradigm.

I think of Chrome as part of a category of products (web browsers) that are disruptive to another category (OS’s). That’s what disruptive innovation really means, and I believe that Chrome is going to accelerate that process.

The definition of disruption from http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Disruptive_technology:

“Disruptive technology (or disruptive innovation) is a term proposed by Clayton M. Christensen to describe a new technology that unexpectedly displaces an established technology. This is contrasted with sustaining technology, which is viewed as incrementally improving or evolving technology.”

Based on this definition, Chrome is more of a sustaining technology that is trying to improve the existing browser technology that exists today.

Does Microsoft have to worry about the new model of delivering applications on a browser instead of an OS? Absolutely. They have been worrying about this for a number of years now. The advent of Chrome does not change this.

Interestingly, just a few months ago Harvard announced an Executive Education course on the subject. It looks interesting. Here’s the link…
http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2008/08.21/00-hbs.html

Hmmm: surely “risk-averse VCs” would be like a tomato-averse pizza company?

Perhaps the time is right for “ideanomic disruption” in the VC arena? I’m thinking in terms of a mechanism whereby banks can construct more aggressive ways of funding (such as Bowie Bonds, and/or patent-holding SPEs/SPVs, though not Enron-style, of couse). Certainly the investment banks have no difficulty in engineering weird and wonderful financial instruments, so there’s no intrinsic problem with the numbers. Yet the legal cost of constructing such a working framework from scratch is currently likely to be prohibitive for all but the largest deals.

And so I think that the most disruptive piece of ideanomic research you could do/commission/support/encourage would be this: to produce a basic legal framework for a patent-holding / rights-holding SPE, so that banks can make early-stage investments into companies without invoking excessive legal cost in the process.

What do you think?

Cheers, …..Nick Pelling…..

Tim Ramsey

On the other hand, for a lot of reasons enterprise software vendors interact primarily with their most demanding and sophisticated customers/users (very much the “lead users”) and work very closely with them - usually at their location for extended periods of time learning about their needs and ideas. This can lead to some very important benefits - especially the “filling-out” of the product with all the capabilities it needs to support the full needs of the customer.

However, I am also convinced that this process is difficult to manage, not only because these big customers can come to exert enormous power over the design trajectory (and can “bully” the vendor into making the product in the customer’s image), but also because this can have the effect of narrowing the product’s market appeal to the segment that looks exactly like them. The company may actually end up with a very innovative and sophisticated solution, but it won’t matter much if there are only 10 customers that can appreciate it. What is needed is a method for determining which “lead users” and which ideas are truly representative of broader future market trends. This has been notoriously difficult for many companies in the world of business software. This is one reason why your point about communicating with users outside of your customer base may be so useful for identifying key dimensions of innovation. Thanks again for your comments!

I found this posting to be very interesting. My quick thoughts (I might be back for more):

von Hippel recognized the trap of being too customer-oriented a decade before Christensen.

Lead user research was a methodology designed to (1) identify the most demanding users and (2) use tools to uncover tacit/sticky information that users can’t easily communicate. For radical innovation, lead users sometimes had to be users totally outside your customer base.

If you work to recognize the most demanding users, and use tools to uncover sticky or tacit information you will definitely be both more inventive and innovative. If instead you focus on your average customer and communicate through surveys, casual conversation, or focus groups you are toast.