Superbly written and inspiring article at Forbes about the health challenges faced by highly regarded author and Harvard professor Clayton Christensen. Christensen’s influential book, The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail, is a must read for every business person, as it captures and explains the essence of the process of innovation, as well as its impact on competition. (I found this book to be far more useful in the context of developing and/or evaluating business strategies and investment opportunities than Michael Porter’s Competitive Strategy
Archive for the ‘Bureaucracy Busters’ Category
Clayton Christensen: The Survivor
Wednesday, March 16th, 2011Publishing and Advertising 2.0 – Part 2
Friday, February 16th, 2007The Internet will continue to drive major structural change into the advertising and other digitizable media for the next 25-35 years. (The Carlota Perez book previously mentioned explains paradigmatic technology diffusion; Ray Kurzweil, referenced below, builds on the same concept to posit that technology/human change has accelerated since time began and will continue to do so, resulting within 30 years in implanted brain chips that leverage our thinking capabilities the way our foot on the gas petal leverages our muscular capabilities). Anyway, back to the present. Broadband connectivity (medium band, really – until we get more competition in telecoms, the 100MB/sec links available throughout Seoul, Korea and other foreign cities will be a figment of our imagination here) just recently hit critical mass in the US. Broadband mobile phones (again, medium band vs other nations) will reach critical mass in the next three years. That $200/household for Internet ad spend represents only that revenue that has been derived from the move of print ads to the web; audio/video related advertising is at its inception (and is why Google paid $1 billion for the largest market/mind share position in that market. Audio search is well developed and will begin to be monetized via ads soon. Video search has further to go, but I have no doubt that Moore’s Law will bring the processing power required to do it to an economically viable level. The number of doublings in processing power/unit ($) of resources consumed just recently passed thirty. Given the exponential nature of this growth, however, the absolute gain from each doubling has now reached the point of delivering stupendous economic impacts (same applies to storage, where you can now easily buy Terabyte storage servers for less than $1000). (more…)
Publishing & Advertising 2.0 – Part 1
Thursday, February 15th, 2007Publishing and advertising are undergoing structural transition last seen when Gutenberg’s press was invented. The Internet, and more specifically, the broadband Internet (which has reached critical mass during the last six years), eliminates the cost of distribution as an economic factor in media publishing and advertising. The fact that some businesses, including most of the historical advertising and publishing concerns, have not adjusted their business models has absolutely nothing to do with Bush or politics. For extended treatments of this subject, see Carlota Perez: Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital and Clayton Christensen: The Innovators Dilemna. For more concise observations in point of the facts of structural change in advertising business, I refer you to these: (more…)