[Sigia-l] Not All Innovations Are Equal?

[Pradyot Rai]

Trenouth, John <John.Trenouth at cardinal.com> wrote:
> Here is a visual of a couple variations on the ideas:
> http://niblettes.com/blog/2005/11/06/theory-of-product-design-part-ii-in
> pd-model/

Thanks for sending that one. That was really neat and helped me
understand that innovation is a "processes" not an isolated activity.
And it is as important to accomplish your strategy, as other descrete
activites depicted in that diagram.

> Take the Segway for example...

Great invention. They failed, not because of any lack of innovation at
product level, except the poor battery life (rest everything I
disagree with your POV). They failed because they were less innovative
at their company's brand, product marketing, environmental concerns,
local laws, processes that leads to make this invention cost effective
and so many other things. They had a genious scientist, but not Steve
Jobs?! That was even biggest blunder to manage such a huge invention.

> Where do you think the balance is and should be between strategic
> opportunism and intenet?

Again you should simplify this word for me -- "strategic opportunism".
About the internet, that was a perfect innovation, a disruptive one.
Nobody thought about how will it be used, or evolve, or shape our
life. Everything else followed.

Only since you mentioned Internet, will I say that there is only one
prescription against innovation, and that is when it is "disruptive
innovation". Example,  internet itself, computer hardware, harddisk
drives, etc... Sometime your innovation is going to commodize your
root cause of prosparity. You should not only stop at that point, you
must abate all those who are doing it. At this point we should applaud
Microsoft's genious :-)

This phenomenon was best explained in the book "Innovator's Delimma".
I would highly recomend you to take a look. Don't buy, it's not worth
that, though :-)

Thanks,
Prady