Category Archives: Innovation

All posts that talk about innovation theory and technological innovations

Disrupting Mobile Phones – Google’s taking the lead and Apple is going to lose

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http://news.phonebloks.com/

Photoblok’s high level picture of their design

For some people, Motorola’s Project Aria, in partnership with Phonebloks, is going to be a game changer, while others are kind of like, meh. I think that the end result of this phone will actually be a game changer, but not everyone will switch to this format of phone. Many people will continue to buy phones that have been designed for the full experience. However, I do think that theses phone will significantly impact in how many people think of phones.

These phones represent a disruptive shift for the phone industry. Why are these disruptive when I said that Kayak isn’t disruptive? Well, in the book Innovator’s Dilemma Dr. Christensen argues that when new industries are formed the leaders are companies that are able to combine all the pieces that are needed for producing that good under one roof. In the case of airline travel all the booking used to take place through the airlines, eventually this was outsourced to Travel Agents which were something of an extension of the airlines. The first disruption came when other groups were able to use the internet to book reservations. The act of reserving a seat on a plane became decoupled with the actual flight and service.

So, in the case of mobile phones, specifically smart phones of course, the most successful firms were the ones that were able to combine everything you needed for the phone to be useful. Blackberry did this, but Apple was clearly the best at it. The original iPhone was basically an iPod with a cell antenna in it. This was an amazing thing though. Apple had disrupted the music distribution industry with iTunes and was able to leverage that innovation into smart phones. This of course was a disruption in that industry because everyone was focusing on productivity first, Apple approached it from a content perspective. Content always beats out productivity. In a very real sense, the market changed over night. Apple owns everything in their cell phone, the OS, the design of the chip, the distribution network for apps, music, movies, etc. This is a very classic example of fully integrating as much of the supply chain as possible.

This is exactly how computers started. Large companies like DEC and IBM built everything for a computer. The boards, the operating system, the software, and the interfaces. These companies were large and structured in a way to make money from extremely expensive mainframes which had a very small market. Between Xerox and IBM the personal computer as we know it today was invented.

Our PCs today are modular, which means that every portion of the computer can be built and designed by different firms. This allows a lot more innovation across the platform because it doesn’t rely on one firm to create everything. It allows specialization and diversification for an assembly company. It was because of this modular nature that Intel, Dell, and Microsoft became successful. They were able to leverage the platform that IBM delivered with the PC and grow and develop new capabilities.

This modularity also allowed just about anyone that wanted to the capability to built their own custom made computer. This has become less so with laptops – you can’t buy an empty laptop but you can customize it from a company. This just isn’t the case with smart phones – which are essentially mini computers. The new tablets coming out are as powerful as computers from the early 2000s.  The modularity of PCs offer an additional benefit, you have the ability to easily fix them. If your processor dies or your graphics card does you can buy another and simply pop it in. Even if the motherboard goes, you can still replace that and plug all your existing components into the board. The case is the only thing you don’t have to change if you don’t want to.

With phones the screen is like the case. You don’t really need to upgrade your screen every time. Especially with how hard the screens are unless you drop the phone and crack the screen you don’t need to replace it. Furthermore, we’re getting to the point we are with TVs that the resolution of the screen isn’t going to make much of a difference. Yes, we’re in a DPI battle between Amazon, Google, and Apple but we’re getting close to the point where we can’t tell the difference. Which means that the screen is a perfect thing to act as the phone’s “Case” for modularity purposes. The modularity will help immensely with repariability, which current scores pretty low, if you’re interested in those scores check out iFixit.

So, how does Phonebloks come into all of this? They are essentially pulling an IBM by creating a system that can be modular. Google’s Android will be the operating system of choice, but it’s likely that even this could be flexible in the manner that PCs are today. It’s unlikely that iOS will be on these phones legally, although I’m certain someone will figure out a way to install the operating system on these phones. This will hurt Apple in the long run as people will not be using their operating system will leave their ecosystem and prevent them from making as large of revenues in the future. People will still buy their products, but there will be much less sales. Apple could be repeating history if they don’t offer to sell their operating system for phones like this.

Why do I think that these phones are going to be winners? Well, it will increase the longevity of the phone. With phones costing upwards of $600 for the top of the line phone anything that can increase the length of time that a person is using one is a good thing. Secondly, as Android and other OSes evolve they require more capabilities from the phone which means older phones aren’t able to use the latest operating system. Buying a much cheaper CPU to install would be a lot better for end customers. This will also disrupt the supply chain as companies like Qualcomm aren’t used to selling directly to customers. Finally, as long as the design is good, then it won’t seem as much of a burden to have the same phone year in and year out. It will require people to think differently, but that’s something that I believe Motorola and PhoneBloks can over come.

These phones are going to change the industry and possibly enable other companies to develops phones in the same way. Hopefully they pick one standard interface like the Motherboard that all companies conform to. This will allow companies like Google and Microsoft to go back to innovating on operating systems and to get out of the phone building business.

Tools that will help disrupt Healthcare

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I’ve been reading this really interesting book on healthcare – it focuses on the potential Hows that healthcare can be disrupted. If you aren’t sure what disruption and/or disruptive innovation is then check out my last blog about some of the industries where it’s occurring and you’re likely part of the disruption.

If you buy your own health insurance you may have noticed a new type of insurance. It was new to me whenever I joined my health insurance company in the North West. Neither AMD nor Samsung had similar plans so when I first signed up for it, I was extremely ignorant of what it was and just signed up for something that looked good. This type of insurance is called HDI w/ HSA.

HDI: High Deductible Insurance. This means that you’ll likely have a high deductible (obviously) and will have to pay out of pocket.
HSA: Healthcare Savings Account. This is an account that allows you and your employer to make pre-tax contributions. You will also be able to pay for healthcare tax-free and accrue interest tax free as well. This is great in terms of how much money you actually gain from this. When you pay for a healthcare service like a Doctor’s visit, you’ll have to pay all $150, however, since you didn’t pay taxes on that $150 you end up saving money. Further, your employer can contribute to this account in the same fashion as your 401(k) and your account will be invested in a similar fashion as a 401 (k).

Of course there are some draw backs to this type of health insurance. First, until you reach your deductible you’re going to end up paying out of pocket. You could potentially have a deductible as high as $5,000 which is highly undesirable. Your employer might not contribute to your account, which places more of the burden on you, which sucks.

How can this contribute to disrupting healthcare? Well, you’re going to start really shopping around for your day to day medical expenses. You’re not going to go to a specialist unless you really think you need to. You’re not going to go straight to the hospital for care. You’re going to try to find another place to get the care you need. This will open up the possibility for care givers to provide healthcare in other fashions. This will potentially change the way that insurers will begin to pay out to providers as well.

There is also a push for Accountable Care Organizations, look for those as well, which are paid based on outcomes rather than the type of service being provided. These organizations will help disrupt incumbent firms and will likely capture the attention of insurance agents. I believe that in many cases this is where a lot of Exchange insurance programs are going.

Personally, I’m excited about the potential to work within an insurance company to disrupt the industry. I believe that there are changes that can be made internally, through educating on what metrics are and how to improve based on these metrics. I also believe that we’ll be in a position to help enable providers to be more efficient and effective care.

Continual disruption – still happening in TV and content

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One of my favorite things to read about is innovation. For those of you that know me, that’s not really a surprise. However, I think that there’s a lot of misunderstanding out there about what “disruptive” innovation is. Most people think that apps that modify the way you do something is disruptive. For example, people have said that companies like Kayak and Hipmunk are both disruptors of booking travel. However, the true disruption came from travelocity or orbitz, whichever came first. These sites really did change the way the game was played for booking travel because they essentially cut out both the middleman (travel agents) and the airlines involvement in book flights. Anything beyond that has simply been sustaining innovations. These are innovations that are quickly co-opted by the existing incumbents as it’s possible for them to do that. A more disruptive technology for travel would view the process holistically from the moment you booked the trip to the time to returned home from your completed vacation. The site would need to account for getting you to your destination without any sort of delays. In James Womack’s book Lean Thinking, they point out the “value add” activity of a flight was only 3 hours, while the total waiting time was over 12 and they didn’t include the effort it took to book the trip back in 1995. All inclusive it’s likely to be much worse now. Especially the way that airlines measure “on time departure” (leaving the gate on time) which is different than our “on time departure” (taking off on time).

In a true disruptive situation you’ll typically see the incumbents resorting to changing laws to keep their supremacy of the markets, we don’t see this in travel at all. Where we do see this is in telecom and cable. The image below from Mashable pretty well explains why this is happening.

There’s likely overlap between users of Netflix, Prime, and Hulu, but if I was cable TV I’d be running scared. I also would love to see this graphic if you add Twitch.tv and specifically ESPN. I think eventually twitch will be disrupting ESPN and the traditional sports networks out there.

How are the cable companies using legal and technical mechanism to limit access to content on Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and Twitch? First, the movie industries have absurd agreements with cable companies (providers) giving their services, like Xfinity from Comcast first access to content. In many cases this will translate into something earlier on the subsidiaries of those in terms of networks. Second, cable providers use their control over the network to throttle the internet speeds of these internet services. This is leading them to try to change the laws around net neutrality so that the cable providers don’t just become “dumb pipes” that content is passed through but the users don’t interact with.

I believe this also indicates that both cable networks and internet providers are being disrupted in a way that they don’t understand. They are using every tool they have at their disposal to fight against the adoption of these services, but they don’t understand what’s happening. Consumers have hired comcast, verizon, and others to provide them a solid consistent connection to whatever content the user wants. Internet providers are trying to force themselves into a middleman role that the users don’t want. When opportunities arise that will allow the user to experience content on their own terms. It’s clear that cable TV is losing the fight and this will only accelerate as people purchase more tablets and devices like that. Chromecast (which allows people to display things from a laptop/tablet on their TV) is another disruption that Google is providing, Amazon has something similar for their Tablets (which will increase Prime usage by the way). The TV companies are losing and need to figure out new business models to stay afloat. This is where disruption is happening. Not in other spaces.

New Economy vs. Old Economy – Creative Destruction

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My last post on this the New Vs. Old triggered a far to brief conversation at work about creative destruction and when it’s “right” for creative destruction to occur. I felt that this was an interesting tact for approaching this sort of conversation. My colleague pointed out that when new businesses challenge laws that are in place just because you have to question if that’s “right” or not.

First, what is creative destruction? I wrote about this over two years ago, so I’ll forgive you not remembering. Essentially, it’s whenever new businesses figure out new innovative ways to provide a service or technology that causes the previous service to be obsolete. Today, it’s more popularly described as “disrupting a market.”

So, looking at creative destruction and the laws that spring up around a given industry I believe that on the extreme there are only two types of laws. Those that protect the consumer/public/end user/employee and those that protect the industry. That’s not to say that this isn’t a gradient where the impact of a given law flows from protecting the public to the industry or in fact does both.

For example, Copyright used to protect both the people that produce music and the public. It did this by guaranteeing a state sanctioned monopoly for a short time period and upon expiration the public would then own the work. This enable the creation of the music industry and helped artists grow and make money. It wasn’t perfect for either party, but it worked fairly well. We all know of stories of starving artists that died and then their works became popular. Well, currently those works still make someone money and that isn’t good for the public. Now copyright lasts as long as 70 years past the death of the original artist. This clearly is no longer protecting the public but is protecting the industry. I would argue that with how far the pendulum has shifted it’d be moral to try to push the boundaries of these laws and creatively destroy the industry. This is currently happening with the copyleft movement.

In the last blog I wrote about AirBnB and discussed Uber in the one before that. These are very different than the music industry. Most cab companies have something called a medallion, which is something like a certification of quality for the vehicle and the cab driver. These are very expensive and have essentially a dual function of protecting both the public and the taxi industry. Uber is challenging these laws because it is a “ride sharing” program where you hail a person going in the direction you are, pay them some money and move on. The purpose of the company is to reduce expense of moving around a big city like San Francisco, increase the competition of the market, reduce the number of cars on the road, and to make money a different way. Depending on your point of view it’s breaking the law. It’s being sued and will likely continue to be sued.

Is it “right” for this company to operate this way? Well, there’s the argument that you don’t have to use Uber at all, so if you’re concerned about the safety aspect you’re mostly covered. Since it’s a personal vehicle the general public is at no more risk than if the car was driving around with one person rather than two. The person is already on the road and likely would have been anyway, so if they suck at driving you’re no more or less safe. However, it’s still possibly in conflict with the law. It’s a new way to hail a “cab” and the taxi companies are having problems adapting to the competition. So is it right or wrong? In this case, I don’t really know. I think that it’s “Right” that a company is forcing taxi companies to evaluate how they do business and to challenge the laws that are in place to protect the taxi industry. I think there could be risks to the public, but they aren’t huge.

There’s another aspect that I haven’t talked about in this model though. A company like Yellow cab has subsidiaries in many different cities. While Uber is an application and it’s “cabs” are in any city where a person is a member. There’s a huge network effect benefit for Uber, they need to do little to no extra work and they can grow into new markets. Uber doesn’t control which markets they enter to some extent or how quickly they grow in a given market, they can grow as fast as the market can support the growth. Yellow Cab has a much different growth potential and can’t enter new markets as easily. If Uber is able to service an under serviced area shouldn’t we support that? Isn’t that “right.” Furthermore, with this rapid growth model it’s nearly impossible to know what laws they are going to be in conflict with until it’s already in the market. Ignorance of course is no defense, but it removes some of the intentional aspects of the creative destruction.

I think that there are certainly moral questions that need to be asked around new businesses and business models. We should continue to ask them and work to make sure that if a new company is disrupting and industry the result is equal or greater protection to the public and a balance between changing laws that protect incumbent industry and the new entrant.

New Economy vs. Old Economy – where the future is going

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Yesterday I posted an article about AirBnB focusing on how it’s upsetting entrenched businesses, neighbors, and has attracted the attention of the NYC AG. I had intended on having a much longer discussion but ended up going down the rabbit hole with that topic. I was influenced to do that article by an article in CS Monitor about the growing backlash against the sharing economy. That article did discuss AirBnB, Uber, and a few other sites. I suggest reading it.

While that article focused on the sharing economy, there’s quite a few other companies that are causing problems for entrenched businesses because of the way they’ve structured their businesses. One of the most prominent companies doing this is Tesla Motors. Tesla has upset a just about every single car dealer in the US. Why? Well, as an attempt to encourage growth of multiple types of car companies the US and many states forced a separation between car dealerships and the manufacturer of the cars. This has worked extremely well for car manufacturers because they are able to push cars to the dealers and the dealers can get them for a discounted price and then sell them to their customers. The US is pretty unique in this approach – it’s why there’s those megadealers all over the place. Tesla is more closely modeling their distribution network off of Toyota where they build a customer for life and build to order. Toyota in Japan is so flexible they can meet an order and have it delivered within a week. Tesla has decided to have “showrooms” where people can look at the car try it out, but they can’t buy it. They have to order it online. Car dealerships are pushing for legislation and suing Tesla over this. I believe that Tesla’s model will work for many consumers but not all. It should be interesting to see how this plays out.

Another area that’s interesting is Twitch.tv, which has turned watching your friend play a video game into the next big thing that ESPN already missed out on. For those unaware, Twitch allows people to stream themselves playing video games and interact with their viewers directly by reading chat and talking to the chat or typing back to the viewers. Through this, games like League of Legends, StarCraft, DOTA, Street Fighter, and first person shooters has turned into a $20 million dollar industry just for tournaments. It’s replacing how people watch “TV” and engage with the people that are watching. These tournaments are pulling 200,000 viewers on just about any given weekend with several thousand in person to watch the event. Each game type has their own celebrities, heroes and villains. It’s still early, but it is going to pull people away from cable and from watching ESPN. I would not be surprised if ESPN began to show some of these events. It might take a few more years, but it’s going to happen.

Finally, the other interesting area where the new economy is threatening the old economy is the Silk Road. The Silk Road was an online blackmarket that used Bit Coins as it’s only accepted currency. It was wildly successful before its owner was recently arrested with approximately $80 million in BitCoin or about 5% of the total currency in circulation. This is the cut that this person made, which means it’s likely that hundreds of millions of dollars flowed through the site selling drugs and other material. With it’s collapse this market is likely to follow a similar path as the music pirating industry. Effectively there will be more security, less people will know what the Silk Road’s replacement is (I heard about Silk Road about 6 months ago) and it might be more dangerous to use. From all reports Silk Road was relatively safe to buy drugs from as the drugs were simply mailed to the user and it cut out the distribution channel where a bulk of the violence occurs.

I think that these types of business models will likely continue to flourish, it’s likely that we’ll see a lot of new types of business models that build upon this. I’m interested in seeing what’s going to happen.