INNOBLOG

Getting the Customers Innovation Job Done
Tuesday, February 28th - 12:30pm - 2:00pm EST

Learn tips and tricks for increasing the odds of creating winning new offerings. Join Harvard Business School Professor Clayton M. Christensen as he discusses his latest research summarized in the recent Harvard Business Review article, "Marketing Malpractice: The Cause and the Cure." He will talk about the jobs-to-be-done framework of understanding customers and expand on these concepts. Professor Christensen will explain how a company can create new markets by innovating to help customers perform a job for which no optimal products exist.

Innosight 1-day Innovation Seminar
Thursday, April 27, 2006 - Chicago O'Hare Hilton

Innosight is holding a one-day, cross-company workshop that will go over the basic disruptive innovation principles and how to put the principles into action. This seminar is a cost-effective way to train you or your team in the principles and can be a vehicle for a team that is struggling with a disruptive problem to learn a new way to problem solve.

The day has been designed to help you develop the capabilities you need to create innovation-driven growth within your organization and to equip you with tangible tools and techniques to do so.

Register by March 15th and save 10%. Register a group and save up to 30%. Seating will be limited in order to enhance the learning experience and enable individualized application of the concepts and tools.

"Best seminar ever (I have taken many in the past 20 years)"
~ Comment from a participant at the December Innovation Seminar

Anyone wanting to send Bill Cower a telegram congratulating him for winning the Super Bowl would have found the following statement on the Western Union Website:

"Effective January 27, 2006, Western Union will discontinue all Telegram and Commercial Messaging services. We regret any inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you for your loyal patronage."

And so the product that helped start Western Union is now gone. The disruption of the telegram is complete. Of course, Western Union, primarily a money transfer service, lives on - in the shadow of companies such as Verizon and SBC. It might have been different.

In 1876, Western Union was given the opportunity to evaluate a recently developed invention called the telephone. After a short review, the company concluded that "The telephone has too many short-comings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us." Consequently, AT&T was formed to commercialize the telephone, and by the time Western Union realized the potential of the telephone, it was too late. AT&T had built up specific expertise that Western Union couldn't replicate. AT&T ended up purchasing Western Union.

Disruption is hard. That's why so many companies fall victim to the forces of disruption. The case of Western Union demonstrates just one reason why. When evaluating new and unknown markets, traditional methods of analysis fall short. Western Union's evaluation of the telephone was perfectly logical. Their business model was built around long distance communication - reporting news and conducting business. In that model, there was no need for a technology that transmitted a very low quality voice signal over short distances. Even assuming some technological advances, the managers at Western Union could not envision business uses of the telephone.

Traditional analysis failed. An approach built around low risk market tests - planning to learn - was required. Such an approach allows for strategies to be developed and business models to be adjusted as more is learned about the market. When the market is unknown, the only guarantee is that initial models will be wrong. Adopting a process that recognizes this fact is one of the keys to being a good disruptor.