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суббота, 15 октября 2016 г.

Diagnosing Dislocation


Don’t assume the new entrant in your market is a disruption. Learn to recognize different types of threats and design the best strategic response.



Imagine that you run a large company, prominent in its industry, with a loyal customer base and strong profit margins. Suddenly, a new product comes along that threatens your existence. It could be a technological development that will render your main product obsolete, just as streaming video is doing to cable television. It could be a more user-friendly way to obtain a similar product or service: Think of the sharing economy versus the traditional hospitality industry. Or it could be a creative new approach to existing offerings, such as the use of mini-clinics and telemedicine services instead of conventional physicians’ groups and hospitals.
As the incumbent being threatened, you want to preserve your business and compete effectively. You quickly confront challenging questions: Should you rapidly emulate what the new entrant is doing? Or would it be better to double down on your existing products and services? All too often, when deciding how to respond, companies assume that they are facing a disruption — following the term coined by Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen. He defined a disruption as an innovation that allows upstarts to build a new market from the bottom up by initially offering simpler, cheaper products and services, often with fewer features or reduced capabilities, but also with a much lower price that appeals to a customer group the incumbents have ignored.
Not every new entrant in your market is a disruption. Learn how to diagnose and respond to threats. For further insights, read “Diagnosing Dislocation.”
But new products and services can enter your market from other directions, each distinct in terms of how, where, and when it affects your business. These are market dislocations — radical breakaways from the existing market that occur when a company introduces a business model or a product that sits apart from those of competitors. Some dislocations come from the top down: They expand the market by giving high-end customers prestige and luxury at a premium price at first. Then, as the new entrants gain prowess and reputation, they add middle-range alternatives that compete with incumbents. One recent example is Tesla’s move from high-end electric sports cars to sedans with a US$35,000 list price. Elsewhere, as solar technology has become cheaper, renewables have begun to threaten traditional energy companies. Still other dislocations, such as the trend toward home- and room-sharing through online rentals, threaten incumbents from the side. Here, there may be no significant price difference. But the upstart provides accessibility and features that incumbents cannot offer or have chosen not to offer.
Then, of course, there are bottom-up dislocations, or disruptions. In these cases, as the new entrants gain market share and proficiency, they add features and versatility. This combination of lower prices and innovation ultimately allows them to replace the old market leaders entirely. For example, as Christensen recounted in The Innovator’s Dilemma (Harvard Business School Press, 1997), the first hydraulic earth movers, in the 1950s, were too small and imprecise for the industry’s typical customers: large construction firms that dug sewers and mines with expensive cable-based heavy equipment. The hydraulic upstarts (companies such as Caterpillar, Deere & Company, and Komatsu) sold instead to an emerging market — house builders. Gradually, they improved their equipment and expanded their customer base. Similar dynamics have been observed in personal computers, disk drives, steel, entertainment retailing (bookstores, video stores, and record stores), home furnishings (for example, from IKEA), digital photography, and many other industries.
Clearly, not all upstart threats are alike — and misdiagnosing your new competition can lead you to respond in a way that can bring further harm to your business. Incumbents often move early into new technologies, even if it means undermining or cannibalizing their existing businesses. Sometimes that’s the right thing to do. But other times it can backfire in devastating ways. Instead of acting rashly, incumbents should take a step back, determine what type of dislocation they are facing, and respond with the appropriate tools and strategies. Not doing so can lead to lost customers and slipping profits — or worse.

Anatomy of the Threat

The key to understanding any upstart threat is to study the way its innovations alter the marketplace. This can be boiled down to the curves shown in Exhibit 1: product/service price versus functionality. The blue curve represents industry incumbents, which have a range of potential price-versus-functionality variations that they profitably offer. They can’t put forward all possible variations — they can’t fill in the entire curve. But everything the incumbents offer will fall somewhere on that blue curve, because that’s where the constraints of the incumbents’ technology and capabilities will place all its products.

The orange curve represents the new technological frontier. Each startup that changes the market enters with its own point on this curve. And every combination of price and functionality will expand the market in some way, drawing in customers. The challenge for the incumbent is to identify where the upstart is breaking in. Is it capturing previously overlooked or underserved customers at the bottom of the market, with lower price and less functionality? Is it capturing customers at the top, with highly valuable offerings that few can afford? Or is it coming in from the side, luring some of the incumbent’s existing customers with extra accessibility or features at similar prices?

Thus, for example, in a typical city, the blue curve could represent the transportation offerings of an existing taxi service or mass-transit agency. New offerings by an Internet-managed ride-sharing service, such as Uber, Lyft, Sidecar, or Haxi, might come in at the bottom, with lower-cost ride-sharing and carpooling apps; they might come in at the top, with premium services as comfortable as limos; or they might come in from the side, offering convenience in hailing, scheduling, and paying for vehicles. Sooner or later, they might migrate to offer all three levels, thus pressuring the existing taxi and mass transit providers to adapt or fail.
No matter where they enter, dislocations do not simply extend the existing market. Rather, they establish a radically new position with respect to price and functionality. Whereas price is defined purely by the market, functionality is a matter of customer perception. Of course, different customers prefer different options. Purchasers of all-electric cars, for example, have about a dozen manufacturers to choose from, and customers have their own reasons for preferring one over the others. Similarly, solar power may be highly prized by some customers, and not at all important to others. Therefore, functionality will always be partly subjective.
New entrants develop their sustainable competitive functionality in several different ways. For example, technological advances often lead to upstart products with superior functionality. Customers defect en masse to the products they perceive as having greater value. The smartphone gained its enormous market share in this fashion. In other instances, the dislocation benefits from being hard to copy. Strong practical, legal, financial, or other barriers make a response difficult. The apparel company Inditex (known for its brand Zara) achieved success this way. Its seamless integration between manufacturing and sales is very difficult for others to emulate, and makes it possible to change clothing designs quickly, without resorting to money-losing markdowns or inventory gluts. At other times, customer frustration or dissatisfaction with existing products or services, whether widely recognized or not, increases the demand for alternatives. Ride-share services have thrived, in part, because customers find existing taxi services problematic. Finally, social considerations can drive adoption. These considerations may be rooted in regulations or cultural influence, but they help upstarts with products and services perceived (for example) to help the environment or improve people’s health.
As an incumbent, you need to find a strategy that will improve your functionality and price-competitiveness compared with those of the new entrants. You can do this in several ways. Your choice should depend in part on your own capabilities and in part on what type of upstart threat you face. In a recent in-depth analysis of six industries currently undergoing dislocation, which included more than two dozen interviews with executives, industry analysts, innovation experts, and entrepreneurs, we studied the characteristics of each type of dislocation and its growth phases; most important, we also studied how companies can recognize and respond correctly to each threat before it eats away at their core business. (Editor’s note: Except where noted, the case studies cited are based on PwC’s internal research and represent the author’s opinions, rather than the views of the companies mentioned.)
The research revealed four strategies that companies can adopt in the face of dislocation. Two of them, matching the threat and absorbing the threat, can be effective when incumbents are facing new entrants coming from any direction (from the top, side, or bottom). A third, leapfrogging the threat, is most effective in dealing with dislocation from the top and from the side. And finally, the strategy of ignoring the innovation is most commonly associated with disruption from the bottom. Each strategy has risks, especially when it is used at the wrong moment or against the wrong threat. But when you understand where the threat is coming from and how it is changing your market, you can choose a strategic response that is likely to sustain your business.

Strategy 1: Match the Threat

The first strategy involves improving your existing offerings to keep your existing customers, and expanding the market. This is the most obvious response to dislocation and can be effective in confronting threats from all directions. Taxi companies, for example, seek to match the threat posed by ride-sharing companies when they create their own ride-sharing apps and “frequent rider” cards, which they market by reminding passengers that taxis don’t have surge pricing.
Of course, company leaders often resist the idea of launching an inferior, lower-priced product to match a newcomer that isn’t yet competing for its primary customers. Yet the strategy can work in a bottom-up scenario. The incumbent needs to create a product or service line distinct from its core line, often as part of a separate division, and have that new product line compete with the core one. Basically, these companies cannibalize themselves before the new entrant can. Consider HP’s moves to create a separate division for inkjet printers, allowing it to compete with the company’s established and highly profitable laser printer business.
When a dislocation starts at the mid-market or higher, however, the incumbent must change its core product line to stay competitive. The automobile industry, for example, faces a dislocation from electric vehicles (see Exhibit 2). Since 2009, according to the fuel efficiency research firm Baum & Associates in West Bloomfield, Mich., 2.7 million gas–electric hybrids, 217,000 plug-in hybrids, and 240,000 all-electric cars have been sold in the United States. Although this represents only a small portion of overall sales, shifts in federal and state policies are pushing electric vehicles into mass production. California will require carmakers to show that zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs) account for 15.4 percent of their sales within the state by 2026.

The regulatory pressure on carmakers is reinforced by social sentiments among early adopters, who typically want to increase their fuel efficiency in a way that helps the environment and reduces dependency on offshore oil supplies. These trends are expected to translate into 800,000 ZEVs sold annually by 2025 in the Golden State and in 10 other U.S. markets that are following its lead. This dislocation is essentially a story of electric car buyers spending more than they would spend on an equivalent gas-powered vehicle. The high price point of Tesla’s original offerings, for example, has given other automakers time to develop a response.
To be sure, when Tesla started taking orders for its Model 3 in 2016, with an announced price of $35,000, the company received more than a quarter-million $1,000 deposits in the first weekend. Tesla’s market value is now approaching that of General Motors. But it is hardly alone in the field. Nissan, Honda, Kia, Fiat, Chevrolet, BMW, and Smart are among companies offering electric cars in all price ranges.
Another example of matching is the power utility industry facing solar energy. As battery and solar panel technology come down in price, it becomes worthwhile for many customers to install photovoltaic panels, which they often see as either home improvements, ways to survive during power outages, or gestures with environmental impact. By 2016, 784,000 homes and businesses in the U.S. had solar panels in place; solar and wind energy provided a combined 5.3 percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. in 2015, up from only 2 percent in 2008, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The trend appears to be accelerating (see Exhibit 3). “The integration of renewables, the reduction of reliance on coal, and those sorts of things are changing our industry dramatically,” said Ron DeGregorio, president of Exelon Power.

Finally, matching is happening as the healthcare industry faces dislocationfrom the bottom up — people are seeking convenience and price breaks. Since the early 2000s, new clinics have appeared by the thousands to serve patients. They include basic consultation services in retail stores such as Walmart, Walgreens, and CVS; walk-in urgent care centers that offer a cheaper and more convenient alternative to a hospital emergency room; and virtual medical groups that provide online consultations with doctors for as little as $40 (see Exhibit 4). The last are particularly popular with working mothers; for example, the online service Doctor on Demand claims that nearly 70 percent of its customers are women and more than half of them have school-age kids. Having a sick child used to mean a trip to the doctor, making the child’s mother late for work. “Now she fires up the iPad [and] types in the symptoms, and within a few minutes she’s chatting with one of our family practice doctors or pediatricians,” said Adam Jackson, CEO and cofounder of Doctor on Demand. “Ten minutes later, if appropriate, we’ve sent a prescription to her local pharmacy.”



Doctor on Demand is an upstart, but so is retail giant Walmart in this case. Half of its 4,600 in-store health assessment kiosks (from Pursuant Health) average 50 to 60 risk assessments each on a typical day. “Within a few years, we will do more health risk assessments than the entire existing health system,” predicted Marcus Osborne, Walmart’s vice president of health and wellness transformation.
The incumbents are large hospital groups, established healthcare providers, and payors. Many of them welcome dislocation; it takes pressure off their emergency rooms and other beleaguered facilities. Some incumbents are creating collaborative partnerships in order to match new offerings. They are eagerly working with smaller innovative healthcare providers to cut costs, widen profit margins on core services, and improve patient service with referrals to local clinics. Through these efforts, incumbents are developing some upstart-like attitudes of their own.
In the past, said Walmart’s Osborne, “consumers have been characterized as not able to manage their own care. [New] solutions and technologies are completely changing that.” These solutions, he added, “basically assume that the consumer actually is very intelligent, very rational, and will do the right things if you give them the right tools at the right place at the right time to engage their care.” As this perspective takes hold in incumbent hospitals, it makes them more nimble and effective as well.

Strategy 2: Absorb the Threat

With dislocation, one effective response is to bring the upstart into your own system — through M&A or venture capital funds that invest in upstarts directly. The absorption strategy can work for dislocations that come from any direction. But it mandates a high level of skill in all cases: Deal making requires postmerger integration capabilities, partnerships require ongoing and often arduous collaboration, and venture capital requires investment acumen. When making an acquisition, the incumbent must enhance the new business and create conditions for its success. Acquiring a company with an objective to kill the threat is a waste of money, and serves only to invite more upstarts to enter.
Facebook has deftly managed absorption through M&A — perhaps because it was an upstart itself not so long ago. The company drew some Monday-morning quarterbacking in 2014 when it paid a jaw-dropping $19 billion for WhatsApp. But the upstart messaging platform had already attracted more than 400 million monthly users, including many Gen Z customers who preferred messaging over writing Facebook-like posts. The bet has paid off; Facebook’s share price has nearly doubled, and the number of WhatsApp users has grown steadily since the deal was signed.
You can find absorption in the digital marketing industry (see Exhibit 5). Here, disruption is happening, with the dislocation appearing at the bottom. Upstarts with data-rich analytic software can scour thousands of attributes about potential customers and send them exactly the right offer at the perfect time over the best channel. This has dramatically altered the price and quality of marketing efforts, triggering a highly complex dislocation involving thousands of new companies.

Scott Brinker, an industry analyst who is also CTO and cofounder of Ion Interactive, began tracking this area in 2011, when there were about 100 vendors involved in digital marketing and the technologies that support it, including mobile app development tools and marketing databases. Based on his original criteria, he now estimates there are about 4,000 upstart companies, ranging from tiny startups to giant global software companies. That’s about a 40-fold increase in around five years.
Venture capital firms have been involved in many of these marketing-firm absorptions. An example is Signpost, which targets small businesses, a segment of the market typically ignored by larger players. There are tens of millions of small businesses — mostly mom-and-pop retail shops — that could use marketing automation to attract and retain new customers. But they aren’t interested in costly enterprise-level technologies. Signpost has built its business with this bottom-of-the-market group. For just over $200 a month, the company collects phone numbers, email addresses, and point-of-sale data from local customers, then uses that database to gather feedback, generate reviews, drive social media awareness, and encourage return customers through offers and promotions. Signpost can keep the price low because it provides one automated service to all its customers. “We’re in the automation box, and Salesforce is in the do-it-yourself box,” explained Brad Kime, senior vice president of business development. Signpost has attracted $35.6 million in venture funds in its quest to democratize the digital marketing revolution.
The continuing opportunities to compete in the new market thrill entrepreneurs such as Adam Marchick, chairman of Kahuna. The mobile marketing automation company started in 2012 with a relatively humble $300,000 investment from SoftTech VC. A former venture capitalist himself, Marchick said he thinks Kahuna could make acquisitions of its own to better compete with Salesforce and other giant enterprise software companies. In 2015, Kahuna recruited Fayyaz Younas, a vice president of engineering who was leading Salesforce’s analytics initiative. “I’ve seen what it takes to build a billion-dollar company and I’ve learned a ton,” Younas said in a Wall Street Journal article at the time. “I see that in Kahuna.”
Some incumbent software companies have augmented their internal innovation by acquiring “best-of-breed” startups. Salesforce.com, for example, acquired the upstart digital marketing firm ExactTarget for $2.5 billion in 2013 as the heart of a $4 billion acquisition spree. Salesforce has also invested in well over 100 startups through its corporate venture fund, which often leads to integration into its cloud. Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud CEO Scott McCorkle, who joined the company as part of the ExactTarget acquisition, notes that digital marketing lends itself to mass experimentation. “I think you’re just seeing an explosion of innovation around that,” he said, stressing that Salesforce also has a strong internal culture of innovation. “I have never seen a company so driven to reinvent itself.”

Strategy 3: Leapfrog the Threat

To leapfrog is to expand your offerings, enabling you to protect your core business while providing something better than your new competitors can. To accomplish this, you develop a strategy and invest in innovation that results in a major shift in your own business. The goal is to offer higher-quality and more desirable products or services, ideally at a somewhat lower cost, and thus to move rapidly past your threatening competitors. Consider the trajectory of the smartphone, as the iPhone and Android models have wrestled for dominance, or the moves by some carmakers to design connected vehicles to stay ahead of potential competitors from outside the traditional auto industry. Incumbents need to build the capabilities that can sustain their new identity, because the new business might well become their main source of revenue.
The leapfrogging strategy works best when the threat comes from the side or from above. It is hard to leapfrog a disruptor that has a much lower cost proposition and pursues the least profitable customers. But customers who are defecting because of features you lack may well be interested in what you can offer to draw them back. For example, consider the struggle between home- and room-sharing companies such as Airbnb, HomeAway, FlipKey, and HouseTrip, and conventional hotels. The rapid ascent of shared-lodging services has dramatically affected the global hospitality industry and may become even more of a factor. For example, Airbnb has an inventory of more than 2 million rooms globally, whereas each of the eight largest hotel chains in the U.S. has, on average, 500,000 rooms.
Shared-lodging services are often described as a disruption, competing from the bottom. But they are more accurately a dislocation from the side, competing effectively at all price levels (see Exhibit 6). Data from Priceonomics, using Airbnb as the example, shows average rates in its 10 priciest cities ranging from $130 to $185 per night, which is below the average range of $180 to $245 for hotels. However, data can be misleading. A CBRE Hotels study that included 59 cities and 229 submarkets found the average rate paid for an Airbnb unit was $148 compared to $119 for hotels. Furthermore, both hotels and Airbnb offer options at a below-average cost; we found basic rooms for both starting under $50 that appeal to travelers on a tight budget.

Shared-lodging service providers offer several functional differences as distinct advantages over hotels. These may include a simple mobile app, comfort-of-home accommodations, and the personal attention of a local host (the property owner). “They’ve taken a process that was a social process — getting to know people and trust them — and transformed it into a weightless and massless Internet process that can grow,” said Andy Lippman, associate director of the MIT Media Lab.
Both social factors and technology have bolstered the lodging industry. For instance, Airbnb’s low-overhead business model is hard to match for traditional hotels; it has few employees, no construction costs, and no furnishings. Those are provided by the property owner, while the company collects a fee for the referral. The company’s mobile app enables guests to choose a room by price, location, and features, and also to gain detailed information about the hosts.
Given the vastness of the hospitality industry — it accounts for close to 10 percent of worldwide GDP — there has been little measurable reaction to the dislocation caused by new lodging service providers. And, to be sure, the shared-lodging industry faces its own risks as governments add taxes and regulations that bog down the sharing economy model. Still, hotels cannot ignore the threat of sharing services much longer, particularly if luxury and business travelers, the core customers of the hotel trade, join in.
The solution is for major hotel chains to develop models that would leapfrog lodging service providers, by creating branded networks of private rentals as an option for core customers. Customers might still stay in private homes, but they would have access to branded amenities such as delivered breakfasts, gifts, or inclusion in frequent-traveler programs. This blend of new and old, coupled with updated apps, could offer traditional customers a broader range of options. It would also leverage some of the cost-effective advantages that lodging providers hold now, such as reducing the need to build and maintain facilities.
Traditional cable is another industry for which leapfrogging can be a powerful strategy. Cable television providers face a mounting threat from over-the-top video streaming providers. Streaming offers convenience, and is often lower in cost because viewers can either watch free programs or subscribe to specific services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, or Hulu for less than $10 a month — much less than the typical cable subscription (see Exhibit 7). (Of course, many consumers end up subscribing to multiple streaming services, and the costs add up.) Although most consumers have traditional subscriptions, millions are “cord shavers” who now opt for low-cost basic cable while streaming premium shows on their own schedule. This dislocation is changing the financial outlook for networks and cable providers, and affecting the way people watch TV.

Incumbents are feeling the pressure acutely, as conversations with industry analysts have revealed. But will cable go the way of video rental stores? Hardly. The answer for traditional cable providers may be to leapfrog their upstart competitors by rethinking their business model. As reported in PwC’s Videoquake 3.0 study, some incumbents have begun experimenting with “skinny bundles” — allowing consumers the option to customize the specific channels they want, rather than having to purchase a package of hundreds of channels (many of which they will never watch). That trend, combined with providers’ ability to enable consumers to access programming from any device, both at home and on the go, gives incumbents an edge. They can provide consumers with the ideal viewing experience: the broadband access they need, the channels they prefer, the flexibility they want. It will require incumbents to think differently about how they provide and sell services, but if they do so successfully, they could keep their customers and attract new ones — for example, millennials who might never have subscribed to traditional cable.

Strategy 4: Ignore the Threat

Although some bottom-up disruptions capture the entire market and can drive incumbents out of business, many other disruptions can capture only a portion of the market — leaving a significant share for incumbents. In these latter situations, companies must decide whether to react to the upstart using the match or absorb strategies, or to ignore the upstart.
However, ignore in this case does not mean do nothing. Incumbents may not need to respond to the disruption by trying to re-create or improve on it themselves. It may make more sense for them to pay greater attention to their core customers in order to maximize their portion of the market. For instance, consider Southwest Airlines, which was clearly a disruptive market entry. Some airlines decided to fight Southwest by launching low-cost airlines as separate subsidiaries. In most cases, that response was unsuccessful. Examples include Delta’s Song and United’s Ted, both of which operated for just a few years before being shuttered.
Many other incumbent airlines instead focused on improving their services and making them more efficient for their core customers. Today, we see a niche of budget airlines led by Southwest, but also many full-price airlines that survived and emerged as stronger players. Those incumbents who took no action at all — not even improving their core business — fell victim to the consolidation that has swept the airline industry in recent years.
The healthcare industry, discussed earlier as an example of the matching strategy, may also benefit from using the ignore strategy. Should providers (hospitals) directly respond to new entrants, and fight for price-sensitive patients who can potentially migrate? Or should they ignore them and concentrate on making services better for their core customers? The answer may not be clear for several years to come.
Sometimes, multiple dislocations occur at once, and thus the question becomes: Which dislocations require an action and which don’t? A good example was when Betamax (Sony) and VHS (JVC) were dislocating the television programming market in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Incumbents first tried to prevent the new technology, claiming that recording infringed upon the programming ownership rights. But the time came when they had to select which format to respond to. It was not an obvious choice, given that Betamax had superior picture quality. Eventually, VHS gained small business advantages that led to its victory: JVC’s early video players were cheaper, and one of its tapes could hold an entire movie (Betamax could only hold one hour of video). Both business and technology foresight are essential for making the right bet.
Of course, many industries offer examples of prominent companies whose failure was associated with ignoring their upstart rivals too long; among them are Kodak in photography, Smith-Corona in typewriters, and Nokia and Research in Motion in mobile devices. Ignoring a threat is risky. But responding to the threat is also risky, especially when the response involves a major up-front investment or a cannibalization of existing sales.
The secret to ignoring a disruption is thus not to ignore it at all. Every company needs to determine the appropriate balance between waiting and responding. If and when the time comes to respond, you should be prepared with an appropriate strategy. And in the meantime, you have an opportunity to respond through incremental innovation, particularly in your operations. If you can lower your own costs and expand the perceived functionality of your products and services, bit by bit, you will make things harder for upstarts.
The easiest way to ignore them is by having a platform where the switching costs are difficult. Microsoft, Google, and Facebook have been able to ignore many potential threats because their customers are virtually locked into their systems. To change, core users would have to transfer their systems and rework their practices.

Making Your Diagnosis

Companies facing a serious threat to their market often first respond by trying to ban the innovation. Powerful incumbents may lobby government and regulatory agencies, or use economic and social arguments to slow or hinder the innovation in some way so that it becomes less economically viable. Yet such knee-jerk reactions are rarely successful in the long run, and they can slow progress and industry evolution.
Instead, incumbents need to recognize the distinctions among the various types of dislocations they may face. Disruptors typically first go after nonusers or the least profitable low-end customers. Only later do the disruptors start capturing an incumbent’s core customers. In response to disruption, the incumbent should create an offering or business that is separate from its core product offering. You don’t want to change your core business and risk losing existing profitable customers while competing (initially) for low-end customers and nonusers. You can make your move through matching or through absorption. Of course, on those occasions when your market assessment reveals major flaws in the new technologies being offered, consider whether you should ride it out, rather than jumping into competition too hastily.
New entrants coming from the side or from the top, meanwhile, go after an incumbent’s core customers right away — thus presenting a more immediate threat. In these cases, the incumbent should change its core product offering. This can again be accomplished through matching, and also through leapfrogging, both of which enable the incumbent to pursue new customers while keeping the existing profitable customer base intact.
The choices are never easy, but with a complete framework for analyzing new entrants, you, as an incumbent, can feel confident that your response is appropriate for the threat at hand. Market dislocations can come from anywhere, and knowing that is half the battle.
Reprint No. 16310

четверг, 13 октября 2016 г.

Innovator’s Dilemma


Clayton Christensen’s book “The Innovator’s Dilemma (Harper, 2000) is certainly one of the most important business and strategy books from the last two decades. If there is one chart and concept that summarizes his theory on disruptive innovation, it’s the chart on the evolution of the disk drive industry.

Christensen spent years analyzing the industry in minute detail, looking at every aspect of the industry, from the performance of new products coming out to the demand of the various sectors of the computing industry. The disk drive industry had a number of specific advantages which made it a perfect case study for innovation: A global industry, with lots of data, relatively homogeneous product performance elements, and a dynamic of growth and innovation.

At the core of Christensen’s theory is that technological innovation has a way of outstripping demand. A set of suppliers who have perfected the art of the 14 inch disk technology, serve a set of customers in the mainframe computer industry. These suppliers do everything right: they serve their customers well, listen to their needs, continue to develop better and better products, etc. Along comes a new technology, such as the 8 inch disk technology. Originally, the leading suppliers don’t take this technology seriously. The new technology is far from achieving the same performance as the established technology, it cannot fulfill the needs of their core mainframe customers, and the emerging market for minicomputer is small and irrelevant in comparison to their main market.

But then two things happen: First, the minicomputer market grows rapidly, at the expense of the mainframe market. And secondly, the new technology rapidly gets better, and pretty soon is good enough to fulfill the demands and requirements of even the most demanding mainframe customers.

The chart which combines the technology evolution curves and the demand curves beautifully shows how these disruptive technologies catch up, and ultimately even surpass the older core markets.

воскресенье, 24 июля 2016 г.

Disrupting beliefs: A new approach to business-model innovation




By Marc de Jong and Menno van Dijk



In a disruptive age, established business models are under attack. Discover how incumbent companies can reframe them.
Let’s face it: business models are less durable than they used to be. The basic rules of the game for creating and capturing economic value were once fixed in place for years, even decades, as companies tried to execute the same business models better than their competitors did. But now, business models are subject to rapid displacement, disruption, and, in extreme cases, outright destruction. Consider a few examples:
  • Bitcoin bypasses traditional banks and clearinghouses with blockchain technology.
  • Coursera and edX, among others, threaten business schools with massive open online courses (MOOCs).1
  • Tencent outcompetes in Internet services through microtransactions.
  • Uber sidesteps the license system that protects taxicab franchises in cities around the world.
The examples are numerous—and familiar. But what’s less familiar ishow, exactly, new entrants achieve their disruptive power. What enables them to skirt constraints and exploit unseen possibilities? In short, what’s the process of business-model innovation?
For incumbents, this kind of innovation is notoriously hard. Some struggle merely to recognize the possibilities. Others shrink from cannibalizing profit streams. Still others tinker and tweak—but rarely change—the rules of the game. Should it be so difficult for established companies to innovate in their business models? What approach would allow incumbents to overturn the conventions of their industries before others do? Our work with companies in telecommunications, maritime shipping, financial services, and hospitality, among other sectors, suggests that established playerscan disrupt traditional ways of doing business by reframing the constraining beliefs that underlie the prevailing modes of value creation.2This article shows how.

Reframing beliefs

Every industry is built around long-standing, often implicit, beliefs about how to make money. In retail, for example, it’s believed that purchasing power and format determine the bottom line. In telecommunications, customer retention and average revenue per user are seen as fundamental. Success in pharmaceuticals is believed to depend on the time needed to obtain approval from the US Food and Drug Administration. Assets and regulations define returns in oil and gas. In the media industry, hits drive profitability. And so on.
These governing beliefs reflect widely shared notions about customer preferences, the role of technology, regulation, cost drivers, and the basis of competition and differentiation. They are often considered inviolable—until someone comes along to violate them. Almost always, it’s an attacker from outside the industry. But while new entrants capture the headlines, industry insiders, who often have a clear sense of what drives profitability, are well positioned to play this game, too.
How can incumbents do so? In a nutshell, the process begins with identifying an industry’s foremost belief about value creation and then articulating the notions that support this belief. By turning one of these underlying notions on its head—reframing it—incumbents can look for new forms and mechanisms to create value. When this approach works, it’s like toppling a stool by pulling one of the legs.

The fuller process and the questions to ask along the way look like this:
1. Outline the dominant business model in your industry. What are the long-held core beliefs about how to create value? For instance, in financial services, scale is regarded as crucial to profitability.
2. Dissect the most important long-held belief into its supporting notions. How do notions about customer needs and interactions, technology, regulation, business economics, and ways of operating underpin the core belief? For instance, financial-services players assume that customers prefer automated, low-cost interfaces requiring scale. Because the IT underpinning financial services has major scale advantages, most of a provider’s cost base is fixed. Furthermore, the appropriate level of risk management is possible only beyond a certain size of business.
3. Turn an underlying belief on its head. Formulate a radical new hypothesis, one that no one wants to believe—at least no one currently in your industry. For instance, what if a financial-services provider’s IT could be based almost entirely in the cloud, drastically reducing the minimum economic scale? Examples of companies that have turned an industry belief on its head include the following:
  • Target: What if people who shopped in discount stores would pay extra for designer products?
  • Apple: What if consumers want to buy electronics in stores, even after Dell educated them to prefer direct buying?
  • Palantir: What if advanced analytics could replace part of human intelligence?
  • Philips Lighting: What if LED technology puts an end to the lighting industry as a replacement business?
  • Amazon Web Services: What if you don’t need to own infrastructure yourself?
  • TSMC: What if you don’t need to develop your own process technology or invest in your own infrastructure?
  • Amazon Mechanical Turk, TaskRabbit, and Wikipedia:What if you can get stuff done in chunks by accessing a global workforce in small increments?
4. Sanity-test your reframe. Many reframed beliefs will just be nonsense. Applying a reframe that has already proved itself in another industry greatly enhances your prospects of hitting on something that makes business sense. Business-model innovations, unlike product and service ones, travel well from industry to industry: Airbnb inspires Uber inspires Peerby. So look again at the reframes described in step three above. All of them have broad application across industries.
5. Translate the reframed belief into your industry’s new business model. Typically, once companies arrive at a reframe, the new mechanism for creating value suggests itself—a new way to interact with customers, organize your operating model, leverage your resources, or capture income. Of course, companies then need to transition from their existing business model to the new one, and that often requires considerable nerve and sophisticated timing.3

Four places to reframe

Executives can begin by systematically examining each core element of their business model, which typically comprises customer relationships, key activities, strategic resources, and the economic model’s cost structures and revenue streams. Within each of these elements, various business-model innovations are possible. Having analyzed hundreds of core elements across a wide range of industries and geographies, we have found that a reframe seems to emerge for each one, regardless of industry or location. Moreover, these themes have one common denominator: the digitization of business, which upends customer interactions, business activities, the deployment of resources, and economic models.

Innovating in customer relationships: From loyalty to empowerment

Businesses should strive for customer loyalty, right? Loyal customers tell their friends and contacts how good a company is, thereby lowering acquisition costs. Loyal customers stick around longer, keeping the competition at bay. Loyal customers provide repeat business, a bigger share of wallet, and more useful feedback about problems and opportunities. No wonder companies in so many industries emphasize locking in customers by winning their loyalty.
But the pursuit of loyalty has become more complicated in the digital world. The cost of acquiring new customers has fallen, even without loyalty programs. Customers—empowered by digital tools and extensive peer-reviewed knowledge about products and services—now often do a better job of choosing among buying options than companies do. Switching costs are low. Most significant, the former passivity of customers has been superseded by a desire to fulfill their own talents and express their own ideas, feelings, and thoughts. As a result, they may interpret efforts to win their loyalty as obstacles to self-actualization.
Instead of fighting that trend, why shouldn’t companies embrace the paradox that goes with it: the best way to retain customers is to set them free. The invention company Quirky, for example, lets the ideas and votes of its online community guide the products it designs and produces. MakerLabs, an interactive design–build collective, provides its members with the tools and expertise they need to build what they want.
Established companies can also make the switch from loyalty to empowerment. Consider the pension and insurance industry, long governed by the belief that complex investment decisions are best made by experts (companies or intermediary financial advisers) on behalf of account holders. A multinational insurance and pension provider reframed that belief by proposing the opposite: what if customers preferred to make their own investment decisions, even if they didn’t have the credentials of investment professionals? The company now provides customers with web-based investment information and decision-making tools, along with appropriate risk warnings. These enable customers to invest a percentage of their funds directly in businesses of their choice. This effort is in its early days, but customer pick-up and the profitability of products are promising.

Innovating in activities: From efficient to intelligent

One of the most dominant beliefs governing today’s big companies is that improving efficiency is the most reliable way to increase profits. Especially if market requirements change only gradually, companies have plenty of time to minimize the production costs of their existing products. Today, of course, constant efficiency improvements are a prerequisite for a healthy bottom line.
They may be necessary, but they’re not sufficient. In today’s rapidly changing markets, many products become obsolete before they have been “leaned out,” so managers get less time to optimize production processes fully. Companies are therefore building flexibility and embedded intelligence directly into the production process to help them adapt quickly to changing needs. Embedded intelligence can, over time, help companies to improve both the performance and the value-in-use of products and services and thus to improve their pricing. In essence, digitization is empowering businesses to go beyond efficiency, to create learning systems that work harder andsmarter.
Consider how a web-based global hotel-booking platform used quick feedback cycles to reframe the focus of its business model from efficiency to user satisfaction, thereby opening new revenue opportunities. The hotel-booking industry’s central belief has been that success depends on two things: negotiating power with hotels and a reliable web interface for customers. The company reframed this dominant belief by asking if customers booking a hotel room might look for more than convenience, speed, and price. It tested this reframe through a series of iterations to its website. Even minor changes—such as the use of photographs, a warmer (or sometimes cooler) tone for the site’s text, and the inclusion of testimonials from happy customers—raised the click-through rate. This insight confirmed the reframe: a booking site is more than just a functional service; it can also become an engaging customer experience.
As a result, the company has integrated constant feedback loops and daily experiments into its key activities, creating a true learning system. Now it improves and adjusts its site daily to boost customer engagement and increase revenue. It may well be on its way to becoming the industry’s global standard.

Innovating in resources: From ownership to access

One widespread premise in business is that companies compete by owning the assets that matter most to their strategy. Competitive advantage, according to this belief, comes from owning valuable assets and resources, which tend to be scarce and utilized over long time periods, as well as firm and location specific. Thus ownership (rather than, say, leasing) frequently appears to be the best way to ensure exclusive access.
But what if assets are used infrequently or inconsistently? In these cases, digital technology, by increasing transparency and reducing search and transaction costs, is enabling new and better value-creating models of collaborative consumption. As a result, ownership may become an inferior way to access key assets, increasingly replaced by flexible win-win commercial arrangements with partners. On the consumer side, the examples include Peerby, an app that allows neighbors to share tools and other household items that would otherwise sit idle in garages, and Uber, which allows any driver with a qualified vehicle to provide taxi service. House- and room-sharing programs apply the same thinking to underused real estate. In every case, consumers opt to access rather than own these assets.
Big companies are following suit—for example, by reducing sourcing costs through “cradle-to-cradle” approaches that collect and repurpose what they previously considered waste.4Instead of buying (and thus owning) the raw materials needed for products, companies access these materials in previously sold products and repurpose them. Similarly, the global sourcing firm Li & Fung limits risk, increases efficiency, and enhances flexibility by using broad networks focused on access to (rather than majority ownership of) suppliers. The software maker Adobe Systems no longer licenses new versions of its products to customers through one-time sales; instead it provides access to them through monthly subscriptions. (For more on Adobe’s transition to its new business model, see “Reborn in the cloud.”)
The move from ownership to access mirrors a more broadly evolving societal mind-set toward open-source models. For example, in 2014 the electric-vehicle company Tesla made all of its intellectual-property patents freely available in an effort to encourage the manufacture of clean vehicles.
These possibilities penetrate deeply into traditional industries. Consider how a big European maritime port embarked on a large-scale land-management program. The industry belief reframed by the port was that large liquid-bulk-load ships valued private access to storage tanks. The underlying assumption was that shipping companies wanted the ability to deliver their bulk loads anytime and therefore required entry to their tanks at close range.
In response to this perceived need, most maritime ports have developed jetties to which they provide individual shipping companies private access—essentially the equivalent of “ownership.” As a result of each company’s varying schedules and traffic, many jetties ended up being mostly unused, but others weren’t sufficient for peak times. Seeing this problem, the port’s management reframed the industry belief by asking if customers cared more about access on demand than exclusivity. The port now intends to help all customers use any jetty to access any fuel tank, by developing a common-carrier pipe connecting them. Just as Peerby in effect shifts a neighborhood’s “business model” by increasing the utilization of underused assets, so the maritime port is making more of underutilized jetties and storage tanks by shifting the business model so that shipping companies pay for access to jetties and storage rather than the exclusive use of them. In the future, this model may evolve into a dynamic multiuser slot-booking system that matches the real-time availability of jetties with demand for liquid-bulk-carrier ships.

Innovating in costs: From low cost to no cost

According to historian Peter Watson, humans have been trading goods and services for more than 150,000 years. During that time, we’ve always believed that to sell more of an offering you had to produce more of it. The underlying notion was that a single unit of a given product or service could be used only by one customer at a time. Any increase in production therefore required a commensurate increase in labor, resources, and equipment. While volume advantages did translate into lower average costs per unit, economies of scale could never get the average cost down to zero.
Digitization is reframing this ancient belief in powerfully disruptive ways. In fact, of all the reframes discussed here, this one has had the most devastating effect, since it can destroy entire industries. What’s driving prices to zero is the reframe that multiple customers can simultaneously use digital goods, which can be replicated at zero marginal cost. Massive open online courses, for example, provide a nearly zero-marginal-cost education.
Consider the implications for telecommunications, where the dominant belief has been that value is best captured through economies of scale—the more telephone minutes sold, the lower the unit cost. As a result, the larger the mobile-phone plan, the lower the cost per minute. One telecommunications company is upending this belief by making customers an “all you can eat” offer. It realized that unlimited use of voice and texting units comes at no additional cost to itself, so it can compete against emerging voice-over-IP competitors. As a result, the telco started to offer unlimited texting and voice plans by focusing its economic model on making money from data usage and from its investments in a huge data network and storage capacity. Such plans eliminate confusion among customers and increase their satisfaction. As soon as the network has reached its planned return on investment, incremental data service will also be free.

Big companies have traditionally struggled to innovate in their business models, even as digital technology has brought business-model innovation to the forefront of the corporate agenda. Yet big companies can be disruptive, too, if they identify and overcome common but limiting orthodoxies about how to do business.