The Practice of the theory of the innovators' dilemma

Choosing the axes of choice or defining the axes of performance

In this article, I am going to cross the theories of two important thought leaders and this article is a very important piece if you really want to be innovative and become a clever entrepreneur. This article is the ground of all of what I am doing when I try to come up with new tech-enabled business model ideas but it can be applied to all kinds of business models. it also points the similarity of thinking behind these two books that are

The innovators dilemma by Clayton Christensen

The Practice by Seth Godin

Pr Clayton christen says that the innovator’s product and services must define new axes of performance evaluation by the customer. When he gave the examples of the disk industry, the axes of performance changed when laptops emerged and made the size and weight of disk drives important for laptop manufacturers what was not the case for the mainstream market. in this case, it is the creation of another product that defined new axes of performance judgment for another product but a good entrepreneur should be able to emulate or create such kind of new performance metrics and make the audience he or she is targeting care about this performance. In fact, the entrepreneur could create new sets of customer segments by tweaking these axes of performance. This is the same theory that Seth Godin is trying to explain with his framework called the minimum viable audience by saying that the entrepreneur should play with the axes of choices that are relevant to the targeted audience. This is the thing that he is trying to highlight by forcing people to understand genres and to play with them and all of this is just confirming this statement of Pr Christensen who says that Innovation is a marketing challenge, not a technology challenge. Because you can see that this is about positioning and opening new perspectives rather than building high-end technologies and features which is, of course, important but more if it is about sustaining innovation.

Disruptive innovation is first about framing the problem in a new way that makes the marketplace has other perspectives as criteria of decisions or new ways of usages for adopting the product or service. If the newly framed problem highlights perspectives that make a more important number of people or organizations see new relevant criteria that could make them consider and adopt it then this kind of product or service becomes a market-creating innovation.

But disruptive innovation can also be market-restructuring rather than market-creating because the axes of performance could be redefined by the entrepreneur in a way that will allow him to capture just a portion of the market and if those axes of performance are not easily copiable the entrepreneur could implement differentiation strategy and ask, like Apple or Tesla, a premium otherwise it will be a low-cost strategy like the one used by minimill companies in the examples provided into the innovator dilemma. I could say the same for Dell because after building a standardized cost-efficient process for assembling, selling, and chipping personal computers, Dell provided to the customers not new axes of decision because processing power, memory, and disk capacity have always been criteria of decision but Dell provided to the customer a tool for customizing these axes of performance to their needs providing them, by the way, new axes of judgment which axes of decision that are flexibility and customization.

This example of Dell highlight that entrepreneur could not only play with the criteria of decision but they also can let the product or service as it is and give to the customer a tool for composing the features and performance as they want them.

To stay into the topic of my last article that was about the airline industry I could provide an example of axes that an entrepreneur could exploit. This example is about Freight air transport and Passenger air transport, you could see that for the airliners who travel passenger the age and state of the airplane can matter a lot but for an airliner that handles freight only, it is very like that exploiting older airplanes will matter less as it was the case for construction companies with the rebar. In fact, I was tempted to take all the data about the airplanes of air freight airliners and passenger airliners and see the difference of ages of the airplane of each of this segment because I am almost sure that airliners are migrating their aging airplanes freight routes. But I ended collecting data about airplanes accidents and I am leaving this to you as an exercise and the data are there online for you to work on it. If you are an entrepreneur you can also see that I clearly highlighted to you some business models above.

8 data points aren't for sure enough for highlighting this fact am willing to show with aircraft crash but for sure they provided me a new ax that could disrupt passengers air transportation with a market-restructuring (for me market restructuring and category-defining are the same) innovation that will allow that implementation of differentiation strategy that will yield high profits.

Collecting 11,164 data points about air crashes manually is time-consuming for an alone entrepreneur like me. I can use my programming skills to build scrappers but these data points are dispersed online into many sourced and to be precise it should be done manually. Just this collection of data is like kerosene the fuel for an exciting tech-enabled data-driven product.

https://mkrdiop.medium.com/better-classification-of-the-kinds-of-business-model-274924223b46