disruptive innovation

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Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry by David Robertson, Bill Breen

barriers to entry, Blue Ocean Strategy, business logic, business process, Clayton Christensen, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Day of the Dead, Dean Kamen, digital divide, disruptive innovation, financial independence, game design, global supply chain, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, The Wisdom of Crowds, Wall-E, work culture

“We were told from the top that the minifig wasn’t considered cool.” The Jack Stone “minifigure” (right) and a classic LEGO minifigure. Unlike the classic minifigure, the Jack Stone figure could not be disassembled. Practice disruptive innovation. In his book The Innovator’s Dilemma, Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen introduced his theory of disruptive innovation, which he defined as a less pricey product or service, initially designed for less-demanding customers, which catches on and captures its market, displacing the incumbents.10 Christensen saw how low-quality, low-cost technologies were ramping up faster than ever before.

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To build new growth drivers, LEGO would once again seek out untapped, blue-ocean markets. (We will trace that effort in the next chapter.) And it would attempt to unleash a disruptive innovation—a low-end, low-quality product that improves over time and eventually upends the industry incumbents. In a New Yorker profile, Clayton Christensen cited the pint-size transistor radio as a prototypical example of a big, disruptive innovation. Launched by Sony in the late 1950s, the tinny, tiny radios, using the then-new technology of the transistor, had nowhere near the same sound quality as the big vacuum-tube RCA and Zenith consoles found in many middle-class homes.

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Only then, after exploring the full spectrum of innovation and opening up its development process to outside contributors, did LEGO take on the more out-there strategies of launching a disruptive innovation with Universe and seeking out an untapped market with Games. Universe, of course, was a failure. But LEGO hasn’t given up. Some of the same strategies that work for a blue-ocean effort—adopt a start-up mentality, shield the team from the demands of other business units, realize that “good enough” is sometimes better than perfection—readily suit a disruptive effort. Having learned from its success with the blue-ocean strategy that was Games, LEGO can readily apply those lessons to its next attempt at a disruptive innovation, whatever it might be. As with any innovation effort, seizing on the truths of innovation requires a certain sequence and cadence.

The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries

3D printing, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, Computer Numeric Control, continuous integration, corporate governance, disruptive innovation, experimental subject, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, hockey-stick growth, Kanban, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, payday loans, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, pull request, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, scientific management, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, social bookmarking, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, transaction costs

In Chapter 12, we’ll come full circle. As startups grow into established companies, they face the same pressures that make it necessary for today’s enterprises to find new ways to invest in disruptive innovation. In fact, we’ll see that an advantage of a successful startup’s rapid growth is that the company can keep its entrepreneurial DNA even as it matures. Today’s companies must learn to master a management portfolio of sustainable and disruptive innovation. It is an obsolete view that sees startups as going through discrete phases that leave earlier kinds of work—such as innovation—behind. Rather, modern companies must excel at doing multiple kinds of work in parallel.

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The second problem is that after seeing traditional management fail to solve this problem, some entrepreneurs and investors have thrown up their hands and adopted the “Just Do It” school of startups. This school believes that if management is the problem, chaos is the answer. Unfortunately, as I can attest firsthand, this doesn’t work either. It may seem counterintuitive to think that something as disruptive, innovative, and chaotic as a startup can be managed or, to be accurate, must be managed. Most people think of process and management as boring and dull, whereas startups are dynamic and exciting. But what is actually exciting is to see startups succeed and change the world. The passion, energy, and vision that people bring to these new ventures are resources too precious to waste.

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Usually, companies like Intuit fall into the trap described in Clayton Christensten’s The Innovator’s Dilemma: they are very good at creating incremental improvements to existing products and serving existing customers, which Christensen called sustaining innovation, but struggle to create breakthrough new products—disruptive innovation—that can create new sustainable sources of growth. One remarkable part of the SnapTax story is what the team leaders said when I asked them to account for their unlikely success. Did they hire superstar entrepreneurs from outside the company? No, they assembled a team from within Intuit. Did they face constant meddling from senior management, which is the bane of innovation teams in many companies?

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It) by Salim Ismail, Yuri van Geest

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, anti-fragile, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Burning Man, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Wanstrath, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fail fast, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hiring and firing, holacracy, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Internet of things, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, lifelogging, loose coupling, loss aversion, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Max Levchin, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, prediction markets, profit motive, publish or perish, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, the long tail, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

That said, there is one notable departure for Coca-Cola relative to the ExO philosophy: the transparency of its disruptive innovation. It is our thesis that disruptive innovation efforts work best when they operate in stealth mode, divorced from the rest of the company, so as to avoid triggering an organizational immune system response. Instead, Coca-Cola, taking the long view, has created transparent disruption innovation teams with the avowed goal of openly changing the culture of the larger company. The company has even publicly taken a strategic stance to integrate disruptive innovations into its very core. It is an audacious experiment and we’re watching keenly to see how it pans out.

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Remember the Iridium mobile phones case? The Navteq–Waze case? In addition, consider the well-known NASA motto: “Failure is not an option.” Although noble and inspiring, it was ultimately a death knell for exploration. When failure is not an option, you end up with safe, incremental innovation, with no radical breakthroughs or disruptive innovations. By integrating experimentation as a core value and adopting approaches like Lean Startup, enterprise failures—while still accepted as an inevitable part of risk—can be quick, relatively painless and insightful. Google, for example, is particularly good at experimentation: If a product is not meeting its goals, and resources could be better leveraged elsewhere, the product is shut down.

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Note that today there is a whole category of the media industry—named for the underlying physical media it’s been trying to sell—which is actually made up of information businesses that have now been digitized. We believe the television industry will be the next to fall to the information ax. 3. Disruption is the New Norm In his influential bestseller The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen points out that disruptive innovation rarely comes from the status quo. That is, established industry players are rarely structured or prepared to counter disruption when eventually it appears. The newspaper industry is a perfect example: it sat by for a decade as Craigslist systematically disrupted the classified advertising model.

Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy by Jeremias Prassl

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, call centre, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death from overwork, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, global supply chain, Greyball, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market friction, means of production, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, pattern recognition, platform as a service, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, scientific management, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Singh, software as a service, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two tier labour market, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, warehouse automation, work culture , working-age population

Beijing passengers were quick to take to social media and complain of a near doubling of the cost of rides, as discount codes and other subsidies were swiftly withdrawn.28 * * * Keeping Regulators at Bay 39 Disruptive Innovation? In any event, some proponents of the sharing economy argue, society still reaps major benefits from growth driven by platforms’ innovative disruption of existing business models. Picking up a few stones and hurtling them along in a little sling is, after all, a much less capital-intensive way of going about the business of slaying your enemies than heavy armour and swords, regardless of how many foot soldiers are at it. Not quite, replies the Harvard Business School guru behind the theory of disruptive innovation. In December 2015, Clayton M.

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L. 176 Chen, Keith 122 Davies, Paul 174 Cherry 38 Davies, Rob 151 Cherry, Miriam 97, 99, 132, 173, 174, 184 Day, Iris 177 chess robots 1, 6 Deakin, Simon 36, 112, 130, 131, 152, 172, China 12, 38, 153 174, 177, 178, 184, 185 Chowdhry, Amit 181 deductions from pay 15, 19, 60, 63, 67 Christenson, Clayton M. 39 Deep Blue 1 ‘churn’/worker turnover 68 Deliveroo 2, 11, 12, 13, 115 Clark, Shelby 46 collective action by drivers 113 classificatory schemes 13, 28–9, 147 contractual prohibitions 66–7 misclassification 95, 96–100 employment litigation 99 Clement, Barrie 162 internal guidelines 43–4 Clover, Charles 153 safety and liability 122–3 Coase, Ronald 19, 94, 101, 172 wage rates 65 Coase’s theory 19, 20 delivery apps 2 Codagnone, Cristiano 150 demand fluctuations 78 Cohen, Molly 36, 37, 152, 157 Denmark 36 ‘collaborative consumption’ 42 deregulation 37, 40 (see also regulation) collective action 113–15 Dholakia, Utpal 150 collective bargaining rights 48, 65, 82 Didi 2, 12, 38 commission deductions 15, 19, 60, 63, 67 differential wage rates 109–11 commodification of work 76, 77, 110 digital disruption 49, 50 competition 88 ‘digital feudalism’ 83 consumer demand 17–18 digital innovation see innovation consumer protection 10, 112, 121, 128–9 digital market manipulation 123 safety and liability 122–3, 128–9 digital payment systems 5 * * * Index 193 digital work intermediation 5, 11, 13–16 borderline cases 100 disability discrimination 62, 121 identifying the employer 100 discriminatory practices 62, 94, 113, easy cases 102–3 121, 180 functional concept of the disputes 66 employer 101–2, 104 disruptive innovation 39–40, 49, 50, 95 genuine entrepreneurs 103 dockyards 78, 79–80 harder cases 103–4 ‘doublespeak’ 31–50, 71, 95, 97–8, 133 multiple employers 103 Doug H 160, 163 platforms as employers 102–3 down-time 60, 65, 76, 77 ‘independent worker’ 48 Downs, Julie 180 misclassification 95, 96–100 Drake, Barbara 168 ‘personal scope question’ 93 drink driving 133, 184–5 employment taxes 125–7 Dzieza, Josh 163 Engels, Friedrich 81, 168 ‘entrepreneur-coordinator’ 101 economic crises 145 entrepreneurship 6, 8, 21, 32, 42, 43, economic drivers 7, 18–24 45–6, 50, 52 (see also micro- Edwards, Jim 146 entrepreneurs) efficiency 7 autonomy 53–5 Elejalde-Ruiz, Alexia 175 algorithmic control and 55–8 ‘elite worker’ status 61, 67 sanctions and 61–3 ‘emperor’s new clothes’ 71 wages and 58–61 empirical studies 28–9 freedom 8, 14, 27, 29, 47, 49, 51, 52, employer responsibility 104 53, 55, 65–8, 69, 85, 96, 108, 110, employment contracts 94 112, 113 bilateral relationships 100 on-demand trap and 68–70 employment law 4, 9, 10, 38, 84 risk and 86 (see also regulation) genuine entrepreneurs 102, 103 continuing importance 139–40 misclassification 96–7, 98, 101 control/protection trade-off 93–4, 95 ‘personal scope question’ 93 European Union 107, 111, 112, 178 self-determination 63–5 flexibility and environmental impacts 21, 26 innovation and 90 Estlund, Cynthia 137, 185 measuring working time 105–7 Estonia 127 mutuality of obligation 174 Estrada, David 41 new proposals 46–9 euphemisms 44–5 rebalancing the scales 107–8 European Union law 107, 111, 112, 178 collective action 113–15 exploitation 26–7 portable ratings 111–13 Ezrachi, Ariel 150 surge pricing 108–11 ‘risk function’ 131, 132 Facebook 35, 57 workers’ rights 105 FairCrowdWork 114, 179 rights vs flexibility 115–17 Farrell, Sean 164 employment litigation FedEx 97 FedEx 97, 173 feedback 5, 15–16 France 99 Feeney, Matthew 35, 151 Uber 45, 48, 54–5, 98, 99, 106, 115 Field, Frank 26 UK 45, 48, 98–9, 106, 115 financial losses 22–3 US 54–5, 97, 98, 99 ‘financially strapped’ 29 employment status 21, 45, 47 Finkin, Matthew 74, 84, 166, 169 * * * 194 Index Fiverr 12, 13, 24, 78 historical precedents and CEO 17 problems 72, 73–85 Fleischer, Victor 20, 147 rebranding work 4–6, 32 flexibility 8, 10, 12, 107, 108 labour as a technology 5–6 vs rights 115–17 market entrants 88 food-delivery apps 12 matching 13, 14, 18–20 Foodora 2, 12 monopoly power 23–4, 28 Foucault, Michel 55, 159 network effects 23–4 founding myths 34–5 overview 2–3 Fox, Justin 182 perils 6, 26–8, 31 fragmented labour markets 83, 84, 86, platform paradox 5 90, 113 platforms as a service 7–8 France 78 consumer protection 10 employment litigation 99 potential 6, 7, 12, 24–6, 31 Labour Code 114, 176, 179 regulation 9–10 (see also regulation) regulatory battles 36 real cost of on-demand services 119, tax liability 126 121–2 (see also structural ‘free agents’ 28–9 imbalances) Freedland, Mark 174, 175 regulation see regulation Freedman, Judith 111, 178 regulatory arbitrage 20–2 freedom 8, 14, 27, 29, 47, 49, 51, 52, 53, size of the phenomenon 16–17, 145–6 55, 65–8, 69, 85, 96, 108, 110, work on demand 11–29 112, 113 gigwork 13 on-demand trap and 68–70 Giliker, Paula 183 risk and 86 global economic crises 145 Frey, Carl 136, 185 Goodley, Simon 173 Fried, Ina 183 GPS 5, 57 Greenhouse, Steven 66, 164 Gardner-Selby, W. 185 Griswold, Alison 164, 181 gender parity 144 (see also Grossman, Nick 46 discriminatory practices) Gumtree 20 Germany Gurley, Bill 161 regulatory battles 36 Guyoncourt, Sally 178 workers’ rights 114 gift vouchers 105 Hacker, Jacob 86, 170 gig economy Hall, Jonathan 60, 162, 165 business models 12–13, 44, 100 Hammond, Philip 126, 182 cash burn 22–3 Hancock, Matthew 46, 166 clash of narratives 8 Handy 18 classification 13, 28–9 Hardy, Tess 176 critics 2, 3, 8 Harman, Greg 163 digital work intermediation 5, 11, Harris, Seth 48, 49, 105, 157, 175 13–16 Hatton, Erin 82, 169 economic drivers 7, 18–24 Heap, Lisa 177 empirical studies 28–9 Helpling 2 employment law and see employment Hemel, Daniel 147, 170 law Hesketh, Scott 181 enthusiasts 3, 4, 8 hiring practices: historical gigwork vs crowdwork 13 perspective 78, 79 growth 17–18 historical perspective 72, 73–85 ‘humans as a service’ 3–6 Hitch 38 * * * Index 195 Hitlin, Paul 162 Internet Holtgrewe, Ursula 169 collective action 113 HomeJoy 132 Third Wave 73 Hook, Leslie 153 Irani, Lilly 6, 114, 142, 162, 179 Horan, Hubert 22, 148 Isaac, Mike 170, 171 Horowith, Sara 144 Issa, Darrell 41 hostile takeovers 111–12 Howe, Jeff 7, 11, 142 jargon 42–5 Huet, Ellen 153 Jensen, Vernon 167, 168, 170 Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) 60, 93 Jobs, Steve 35 ‘humans as a service’ 3–6 joint and several liability 104 historical precedents and problems 72, Justia Trademarks 143 73–85 rebranding work 4–6, 32, 40–50 Kalanick, Travis 43, 86 Hunter, Rachel 106, 176 Kalman, Frank 16, 144 Huws, Ursula 27, 141, 150 Kaminska, Izabella 22–3, 44, 90, 148, 156, 169, 171, 172 ‘idle’ time 60, 65, 76, 77 Kaplow, Louis 184 illegal practices 57 Kasparov, Garry 1 immigrant workers 77 Katz, Lawrence 16 incentive structures 67–8 Katz, Vanessa 116, 179 independent contractors 21 Kaufman, Micha 17, 145, 149 Independent Workers Union of Great Kempelen, Wolfgang von 1 Britain (IWGB) 113, 179 Kennedy, John F. 135, 185 industrialization 75 Kenya 36 industry narratives 32–3, 49–50 Kessler, Sarah 151 information asymmetries 32, 54, 87, 131 Keynes, John Maynard 135, 185 innovation 3, 6, 8, 9, 10, 31, 32, 42, 45–6, King, Tom, Lord King of Bridgwater 71 110 cheap labour and 89 Kirk, David 133, 184 disruptive innovation 39–40, 49, 95 Kitchell, Susan 166 historical precedents and problems 72, Klemperer, Paul 165 73–85 Krueger, Alan 16, 48, 49, 60, 105, 106, incentives 86–90 157, 162, 165, 175 myths 72, 83 Krugman, Paul 170 obstacles to 88–90 Kucera, David 186 paradox 72, 87 problematic aspects 85–90 labour law see employment law productivity and 87 Lagarde, Christine 86, 170 shifting risk 85–6 Leimeister, Jan Marco 13 workers’ interests and 89–90 Leonard, Andrew 33, 151 innovation law perspective 36 Lewis, Mervyn 168 ‘Innovation Paradox’ 9 Liepman, Lindsay 184 insecure work 9, 10, 12, 27, 42, 107 Lloyd-Jones, Roger 168 historical perspective 80, 81 loan facilities 68 insurance 123 lobbying groups 32, 47, 48 intermediaries 83 (see also digital work Lobel, Orly 11, 37–8 intermediation) low-paid work 9, 26–7, 40–2, historical perspective 79–80 59, 61 International Labour Organization low-skilled work 76, 77, 82 (ILO) 4, 83, 97, 169, 173 automation and 138 * * * 196 Index Lukes, Steven 159 Murgia, Madhumita 182 Lyft 2, 12, 13, 38, 41, 42, 76 mutuality of obligation 174 algorithmic control mechanisms 56 network effects 23–4 regulatory battles 35 Newcomer, Eric 148, 165 Uber’s competitive strategies 88 Newton, Casey 164 Nowag, Julian 183 McAfee, Andrew 137, 138, 185 Machiavelli, Niccolo 93, 172 O’Connor, Sarah 43, 155 machine learning 136, 137 ODesk 60 McCurry, Justin 186 O’Donovan, Caroline 144, 164, 181 Malone, Tom 73 Oei, Shu-Yi 124, 125, 132, 147, 182, 184 Mamertino, Mariano 161, 163 Ola 2, 12 market entrants 88 on-demand trap 68–70 market manipulation 123 on-demand work 11– 29 Markowitz, Harry 184 real cost of on-demand services 119, Marsh, Grace 182 121–2 (see also structural Marshall, Aarian 186 imbalances) Martens, Bertin 150 Orwell, George 31, 151 Marvit, Moshe 142 Osborne, Hilary 164 Marx, Patricia 119–20, 180 Osborne, Michael 136, 185 matching 13, 14, 18–20 outsourcing Maugham, Jolyon 182 agencies 40 Mayhew, Henry 77, 78, 79, 167 ‘web services’ 2 Mechanical Turk 1, 2, 6 outwork industry 74–5, 76–7, 79, 80, 89 mental harm 57–8 Owen, Jonathan 178 Meyer, Jared 149 ‘micro-entrepreneurs’ 8, 21, 46, 49, Padget, Marty 186 52–3, 63 Pannick, David, Lord Pannick 110 ‘micro-wages’ 27 Pasquale, Frank 8, 40, 154 middlemen 80 Peck, Jessica Lynn 26 minimum wage levels 3, 9, 21, 26, 27, 59, peer-to-peer collaboration 42, 43 94, 104, 105 Peers.org 32–3 minimum working hour guarantees 108 performance standard probations 61 misidentification 95, 96–100 personal data 112, 178 mobile payment mechanisms 5 ‘personal scope question’ 93 monopoly power 23–4, 28 Pissarides, Christopher 19, 147 Morris, David Z. 171 platform paradox 5 Morris, Gillian 174 platform responsibility 122–3, 128 MTurk 2, 3, 4, 11, 12, 24–5, 76, 139, platforms as a service 7–8 161–2, 163 consumer protection 10 algorithmic control mechanisms 56 regulation 9–10 (see also regulation) business model 100, 101, 103, 104 Plouffe, David 154 commission deductions 63 Poe, Edgar Allen 1 digital work intermediation 14, 15 Polanyi’s paradox 138–9 matching 19 political activism 114 payment in gift vouchers 105 portable ratings 111–13 quality control 120 Porter, Eduardo 171 TurkOpticon 114 ‘postindustrial corporations’ 20 wage rates 59, 60, 61 Postmates 57, 63, 121 * * * Index 197 Poyntz, Juliet Stuart 168 structural imbalances 130, 131 Prassl, Jeremias 174, 175, 176, 177, robots 136–7 178, 183 Mechanical Turk 1, 6 precarious work 9, 10, 12, 27, 42, 107 Rodgers, Joan 177 historical perspective 80, 81 Rodriguez, Joe Fitzgerald 181 price quotes 121–2 Rönnmar, Mia 175 surge pricing 58, 108–11, 122 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 133, 185 Primack, Dan 148 Rosenblat, Alex 54, 56, 65, 123, 131, 159, productivity 87 160, 163, 164, 182, 184 public discourse 69 Rosenblat, Joel 165 public health implications 27 Rubery, Jill 84, 169 punishment 57 (see also sanctions) Ryall, Jenny 181 quality control 5, 80, 120 safe harbours 47, 49 safety and liability 122–3, 128–9 rating mechanisms 5, 15–16, 53–4 sanctions 61–3 (see also punishment) algorithms 54, 55, 87–8 Sandbu, Martin 87, 170 discrimination 62, 113 Scheiber, Noam 164 portable ratings 111–13 Schmiechen, James 167, 168, 169 sanctions and 61–3 Schumpeter, Joseph 133 rebranding work 4–6, 32, 40–50 self-dealing 123 regulation 9–10 (see also employment law) self-determination 36–7, 47, 63–5 industry narratives 32–3, 49–50 (see also autonomy) new proposals 31, 46–9, 50 self-driving cars 89, 137 opponents 31, 33–4 sexual assaults 121, 180–1 Disruptive Davids 34–7 sexual discrimination 62, 144, 180 disruptive innovation theory ‘sham self-employment’ 97 39–40, 49 sharing economy 7, 20, 51 New Goliaths 37–40 critics 32–3 regulatory battles 35–7, 47–9 disruptive innovation 39, 49 safe harbours 47, 49 enthusiasts 61 self-regulation 36–7, 47 Sharing Economy UK 33, 37 shaping 32–3, 45–9 sharing platforms 116 regulatory arbitrage 20 –2, 147 Shavell, Steven 184 regulatory experimentation 36 Shleifer, Andrei 111, 178 Reich, Robert 108, 176 Shontell, Alyson 161 Relay Rides 46 Silberman, Six 61, 114, 162, 163, 179 ‘reluctants’ 29 Silver, James 156, 158 reputation algorithms 54 Singer, Natasha 43, 155, 156 ride-sharing/ridesharing 2, 21, 38, 41 Slee, Tom 32, 53, 142, 151, 155, 158, 159 (see also taxi apps) Smith, Adam 73 algorithmic control mechanisms 55–6 Smith, Jennifer 170 business model 102–3 Smith, Yves 148 discriminatory practices 62, 121 social media 114 maltreatment of passengers 121 social partners 10, 94 ride-sharing laws 47 social security contributions 21, 125–7 Ries, Brian 181 social security provision 3, 48, 131 Ring, Diane 124, 125, 132, 147, 182, 184 sociological critique 27–8 Risak, Martin 102, 175 specialization 75 risk shift 85–6 Spera 51, 158 * * * 198 Index Sports Direct 40–1 taxi regulation 21, 36, 37, 38, 114 Standage, Tom 141 vetting procedures 121 standardized tasks 76 tech:NYC 33 Stark, Luke 54, 56, 65, 159, 160, 163, 164 technological exceptionalism 6, 128 start-up loans 68 technological innovation see innovation Stefano, Valerio De 84, 169 technology 5–6, 27 Stigler, George 32, 151 unemployment and 135, 137, 140 Stone, Katherine 67, 165 terminology 42–5 structural imbalances time pressure 57 business model 130–2 Titova, Jurate 183 digital market manipulation 123 TNC, see transportation network levelling the playing field 127–32 company platform responsibility 122–3, 128 Tolentino, Jia 166 real cost of on-demand services 119, Tomassetti, Julia 20, 147, 156, 171 121–2 Tomlinson, Daniel 163 safety and liability 128–9 trade unions 65, 113, 114, 178, 179 sustainability 132–3 transaction cost 19 tax obligations 123–4, 129, 131, 132 transport network company (TNC) employment taxes and social regulation 47–8 security contributions 125–7 Truck arrangements 105 VAT 124–5, 129 Tsotsis, Alex 151 Stucke, Maurice 150 TurkOpticon 114, 162, 163, 179 Sullivan, Mike 180 Summers, Lawrence 111, 131, 178, 184 Uber 2, 11, 12, 43 Sundararajan, Arun 36, 37, 41, 73, 74, 75, algorithmic control mechanisms 56, 151, 152, 157, 166, 167 57, 58 Supiot, Alain 130–1, 177, 184 arbitration 165 surge pricing 58, 108–11, 122 autonomous vehicles and 89 survey responses 120 ‘churn’/worker turnover 68 Swalwell, Eric 41, 154 commission deductions 63 competitive strategies 88 takeovers 111–12 consumer demand 18 ‘task economies’ 76, 77, 79 control mechanisms 54 Task Rabbit 2, 12, 13, 46, 143–4, 163 creation of new job business model 100, 101, 160 opportunities 77–8 company law 56 digital work intermediation 14, 15 contractual prohibitions 66 disruptive innovation 39 digital work intermediation 14, 15–16 driver income projections 51 financial losses 22 Driver-Partner Stories 25, 149 founding myth 34–5 driver-rating system 158, 160 regulatory arbitrage 20 employment litigation terms of service 44, 53, 122, 158, 181 France 99 wage rates 64 UK 45, 48, 98, 106, 115 working conditions 57 US 54–5, 99 Taylor, Frederick 52–3, 72, 158 financial losses 22, 23 tax laws 84 ‘Greyball’ 88, 170 tax obligations 123–4, 129, 131, 132 ‘Hell’ 88, 170 employment taxes and social security loss-making tactics and market share 64 contributions 125–7 monopoly power 23 VAT 124–5, 129 positive externality claims 132–3 taxi apps 12, 20 regulatory arbitrage 20 * * * Index 199 regulatory battles 35, 36 Vaidhyanathan, Siva 40, 154 resistance to unionization 65, 178 value creation 18–19, 20 risk shift 86 van de Casteele, Mounia 182 safety and liability 122–3, 180–1 VAT 124–5, 129 sale of Chinese operation 38 Verhage, Julie 147 surge pricing 58, 122 vicarious liability 128 tax liability 125, 126, 127 unexpected benefits 26 wage rates 58–61, 64, 65 wage rates 58, 59, 60–1, 64, 65, 127 Wakabayashi, Daisuke 171 working conditions 113, 178 Warne, Dan 115 UberLUX 14 Warner, Mark 16 UberX 14, 51, 60 Warren, Elizabeth 127, 183 UK Webb, Beatrice and Sidney 80, 168 collective action 113 Weil, David 83, 169 employment litigation 45, 48, 98–9, 106 welfare state 130, 131 tax liability 124–5, 126 Wilkinson, Frank 84, 130, 131, 169, unemployment 135, 137, 140, 145 172, 184, 185 Union Square Ventures 46 Wong, Julia Carrie 170 unionization 10, 65, 113, 114, 178, 179 work on demand 11–29 ‘unpooling’ 147 worker classification 28–9, 147 Unterschutz, Joanna 178 misclassification 95, 96–100 Upwork 12, 76, 144 workers’ rights 105 algorithmic control mechanisms 56 vs flexibility 115–17 business model 100, 160 working conditions 57, 68–9 commission deductions 63, 67 historical perspective 77, 81 US Uber 113, 178 discriminatory practices 121 working time 105–7 employment litigation 54–5, 97, 98, 99 Wosskow, Debbie 157 regulatory battles 36, 47 Wujczyk, Marcin 178 tax liabilities 126–7 taxi regulation 36, 114 Yates, Joanne 73 transport network company (TNC) YouTube 58 regulation 47–8 user ratings 5, 15–16, 53–4, 55 Zaleski, Olivia 165 portable ratings 111–13 zero-hours contracts 40, 41, 107 sanctions and 61–3 Zuckerberg, Mark 35 * * * Document Outline Cover Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy Copyright Dedication Contents Introduction Welcome to the Gig Economy Humans as a Service Rebranding Work The Platform Paradox Labour as a Technology Making the Gig Economy Work Platforms as a Service Exploring the Gig Economy Charting Solutions A Broader Perspective 1.

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From the Coasian perspective, Uber does not write the epitaph of the firm.’32 Platforms, she argues, speak the language of markets—but they operate like old- fashioned employers, relying on technology to exercise tight control over their workforce. Tomassetti doesn’t deny that gig-economy platforms have dramatically lowered transaction cost in comparison with established competitors. Lowering transaction cost alone, however, cannot account for platforms’ phenomenal valuations and claims to disruptive innovation: there is, despite all claims to the contrary, little that is genuinely novel as far as platforms’ production pro- cesses are concerned. Uber follows the basic lines of a traditional taxi firm; TaskRabbit, those of a labour-outsourcing agency. The key to understanding the business model, Tomassetti points out, is a different one: platforms are but the latest example of ‘postindustrial corporations’.33 They seek ‘to maxi- mize profit, but not necessarily through productive enterprise.

The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing by Michael J. Mauboussin

Amazon Mechanical Turk, Atul Gawande, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Checklist Manifesto, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, commoditize, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, deliberate practice, disruptive innovation, Emanuel Derman, fundamental attribution error, Gary Kildall, Gini coefficient, hindsight bias, hiring and firing, income inequality, Innovator's Dilemma, John Bogle, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Menlo Park, mental accounting, moral hazard, Network effects, power law, prisoner's dilemma, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk-adjusted returns, shareholder value, Simon Singh, six sigma, Steven Pinker, transaction costs, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game, Zipf's Law

By adding battlefields to the game, Leach diluted the advantage of the stronger teams.7 Colonel Blotto also has parallels to business. One illustration is the theory of disruptive innovation developed by Clayton Christensen at Harvard Business School. Christensen studies why great companies with smart managements and substantial resources consistently lose to companies with simpler, cheaper, and inferior products. He calls these upstarts “disruptors” and distinguishes between what he calls sustaining and disruptive innovation.8 Sustaining innovation involves steadily improving a product that already exists. Those improvements can be substantial, but the key is that they build on the existing business model.

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And because products tend to improve over time, the disruptors eventually use their superior business model to make enough money to beat the incumbents at their own game.10 One of the strengths of the theory of disruptive innovation is that it allows us to make predictions. In his book The Innovator's Manifesto, Michael Raynor shares the story of a young lawyer named Thomas Thurston who was steeped in the theory of disruptive innovation. Thurston had the unique opportunity to review forty-eight of the business proposals that Intel's New Business Initiatives group considered over the ten years ending in 2007. Without knowing how each business fared, he used this theory to predict which ones would succeed or fail.

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Thurston created a simple decision tree. If the innovation was sustaining and launched by an incumbent, he predicted it would succeed. If it was sustaining and launched by a new company, he predicted it would fail. If it was a disruptive innovation but was part of the parent company's structure rather than being in an autonomous unit, he predicted it would fail. Only a disruptive innovation that was autonomous had a chance of success. When he compared his predictions with what actually happened, he found that he had been right for about forty-five of the forty-eight business proposals. His predictions were 94 percent accurate.

Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age by W. Bernard Carlson

1960s counterculture, air gap, Albert Einstein, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, Henri Poincaré, invention of radio, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Menlo Park, packet switching, Plato's cave, popular electronics, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, undersea cable, yellow journalism

On one hand, there are the creative responses of entrepreneurs and inventors who introduce new products, processes, and services and in so doing dramatically change everyday life and reorder the industrial world; as Clayton Christensen has suggested, these can be called disruptive innovations.15 On the other hand, there are the adaptive responses of managers and engineers who undertake the steady and incremental work of establishing the corporate structures, manufacturing procedures, and marketing plans that allow products and services to be produced and consumed. Clearly the success of any economy depends on getting the right mix of disruptive and adaptive innovations. Tesla introduced two disruptive innovations that changed the American economy at the end of the nineteenth and the start of the twentieth century.

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In engineering and business schools, students are taught how to objectively analyze the performance of machines and systems, estimate consumer demand, and create new devices on the basis of what they measure—to create what Schumpeter called adaptive innovations. In contrast, what do we actually know—as historians, entrepreneurs, or policymakers—about the other of kind innovation, Schumpeter’s creative innovation or Christensen’s disruptive innovation? Where do these innovations come from? Are disruptive innovations simply caused by mysterious, unknowable forces like genius and luck? How does one harness disruptive technology so that it has a positive impact on a company, the economy, and society at large? These are the questions that Tesla’s story answers. Tesla’s great strength was that he was willing to think like a maverick.

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As Chapter 1 will reveal, Tesla’s father and uncles were all priests in the Serbian Orthodox Church and Tesla absorbed something of that faith’s beliefs that through the Son of God, the Word or Logos, everything in Creation is endowed with an underlying principle.18 In this sense, Tesla was much like the great British scientist Michael Faraday, whose research in electricity and chemistry was strongly influenced by his religious beliefs; Faraday was a member of the Sandemanian Church, a Christian sect founded in 1730 that gave Faraday a strong sense of the unity of God and nature.19 In taking an idealist approach to invention, Tesla was exhibiting what the economist Joseph Schumpeter called subjective, as opposed to objective, rationality (see Chapter 2). For Schumpeter, engineers and managers come up with incremental innovations by going out and assessing existing needs whereas entrepreneurs and inventors introduce radical and disruptive innovations by responding to ideas that come from within.20 With objective rationality, the individual shapes ideas in response to the outside world (the market) whereas with subjective rationality, the individual reshapes the outside world to conform to his or her internal ideas. With both the rotating magnetic field and electromagnetic resonance, we will see that the ideals came from within and Tesla struggled to reorder the social world in order to make his inventions a reality.

Innovation and Its Enemies by Calestous Juma

3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, big-box store, biodiversity loss, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, electricity market, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, financial innovation, global value chain, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, means of production, Menlo Park, mobile money, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, pensions crisis, phenotype, precautionary principle, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, smart grid, smart meter, stem cell, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Travis Kalanick

Using his classic reference case, he said: “Railroads have not emerged because any consumers took the initiative in displaying an effective demand for their service in preference to the services of mail coaches.”24 He added other examples: “Nor did the consumers display any such initiative wish to have electric lamps or rayon stockings, or to travel by motorcar or airplane, or to listen to radio, or to chew gum.”25 In fact, “The great majority of changes in commodities consumed have been forced by producers on consumers who, more often than not, have resisted the change and have had to be educated up by elaborate psychotechnics of advertising.”26 One of the key features of the concept of creative destruction is technological discontinuity. A popular derivative of the thinking is the concept of “disruptive innovation.”27 As noted by Christensen in his original formulation of the theory, disruptive innovation is distinguished from sustaining technologies that “improve the performance of established products, along the dimensions that mainstream customers in major markets have traditionally valued.”28 Disruptive technologies, however, may start off underperforming relative to established technologies.

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Four system domains must be effective if inclusive innovation is to succeed: the product, its retailing and support, the micro-enterprises that provide these demand-side services, and the wider context.”51 It is not sufficient that policies are inclusive; their formulation and the design of new technologies also need to include potential beneficiaries.52 In the final analysis, policymakers will have to invest in managing change, especially where investments in new technologies are needed. Policymakers seeking to support radical technologies must appreciate the challenges of getting support from project managers. In many cases, “Managers with restrictive mental models will adopt up to five disruptive innovation rejection strategies: rewarding incrementalism; ignoring the positive aspects of disruptive innovation; focusing on historical perceptions of success; creating perceptions of success with high effort; and holding beliefs in the face of disconfirming information.”53 Addressing these sources of reluctance to allocate resources to disruptive technologies requires a more holistic understanding of the innovation process, including lessons from discontinued or unsupported technological opportunities that became the foundation for new businesses elsewhere.54 Playing Catch-Up: Institutional Adaptation Laws are among the most explicit expressions of social institutions.

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Schumpeter, Business Cycles: A Theoretical, Historical and Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist Process, vol. 1 (New York: McGraw Hill, 1939), 73. 25. Schumpeter, Business Cycles, 73. 26. Schumpeter, Business Cycles, 73. 27. Dan Yu and Chang Chieh Hang, “A Reflective Review of Disruptive Innovation Theory,” International Journal of Management Reviews 12 (2010): 435–452. 28. Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), xv. 29. Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma, xv. 30. Constantinos Markides, “Disruptive Innovation: In Need of Better Theory,” Journal of Product Innovation Management 23 (2006): 19–25. 31. Gerard J. Tellis, “Disruptive Technology or Visionary Leadership?

The Knowledge Economy by Roberto Mangabeira Unger

additive manufacturing, adjacent possible, balance sheet recession, business cycle, collective bargaining, commoditize, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, first-past-the-post, full employment, global value chain, information asymmetry, knowledge economy, market fundamentalism, means of production, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, post-Fordism, radical decentralization, savings glut, secular stagnation, side project, tacit knowledge, total factor productivity, transaction costs, union organizing, wealth creators

In such an economic order, which is every existing or past example of a market economy, there is no institutional equivalent to Henry Ford’s impossible contract: that he would pay his workers so well that they would be able to buy his cars. Disruptive innovation represents in this sense an adaptation of the insurgent, opportunistic, and innovative firm to the lack of an economy-wide solution to the problem that this section addresses: the absence of a growth-promoting solution to the problem of the reciprocal adjustment of supply and demand. Contrary to the established way of thinking, no such solution results spontaneously from the workings of a variant of the present form of the market economy that has been expunged of failures of competition. Reinterpreted along these lines, disruptive innovation is a way for the disruptive firm to profit at the micro level, in its own world, from the absence of the solution to the problem of the lack of upward growth and reciprocal adjustment between supply and demand at the macro level, in the economy as a whole.

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The firm creates its own demand, given that the economy will not do so for it. It is a micro approach to a macro problem: the disruptive innovators profit, but the deep sources of expansion of the economy on both the supply and the demand sides—the institutional arrangements of the economy, the way in which people are educated, and the organization of the state and of the contest over governmental power—lie beyond their reach and their concerns. We cannot make up for this limitation by simply doing whatever we can to encourage the emergence and development of more such disruptive firms. For one thing, disruptive innovation by the firm is no guarantee of success; most who have attempted it have failed in their competition with nondisruptive businesses, those that remain content to pursue efficiency-enhancing, capital-sparing innovations.

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Its innovations aim to increase the efficiency and diminish the costs with which established goods and services are produced: they result in a better version of a familiar product, with a higher return on capital. Such innovations are efficiency-enhancing and capital-sparing. They do not revolutionize production; they progress by the accumulation of many small improvements. At a fifth level, the firm practices what Christensen has called disruptive innovation: it combines new technologies and business models to produce a variant of an existing product at a much lower price, thus making it available to a broader mass of consumers, or to produce something new, for which it creates the market, finds the consumers, and arouses their desires. Such innovations are transformative: they create new assets in new ways and help make markets—and even wants—that did not exist before.

Peak Car: The Future of Travel by David Metz

autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, bike sharing, Clayton Christensen, congestion charging, Crossrail, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, disruptive innovation, driverless car, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Ford Model T, gentrification, high-speed rail, Just-in-time delivery, low cost airline, megaproject, Network effects, Ocado, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, Suez canal 1869, The future is already here, urban sprawl, yield management, young professional

This is good for authors and readers, but for printers, bookshops, libraries and publishers, the e‑book is a ‘disruptive innovation’ that is undermining existing ways of doing business. At present we have examples of digital technologies improving journeys with Satnav and smartcard ticketing, and of allowing travel substitution, as when we work at home with access to the full range of information and contacts that we would have in our workplace. But these are not radical innovations. Are there disruptive innovations on the horizon for the transport sector? Consider the driverless cars that are being developed by some manufacturers as well as by Google.

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My expectation is that driverless cars, to the extent they penetrate the market, will amount to an incremental improvement, not a disruptive innovation—best regarded as robot chauffeurs. One possible application of this technology would be to taxis, if lower fares increased their attraction to passengers (in which case the innovation would be disruptive to taxi drivers). Driverless trains are already with us—for instance on London’s Docklands Light Railway—safe and practical because access to the system is controlled. Clayton Christensen, originator of the concept of disruptive innovation, argued that the electric car might be such a technology. Possibly the electric car will displace vehicles powered by conventional internal combustion engines.

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Car manufacturers who do not have access to this technology would lose market share, but the battery manufacturers who might make the technological breakthrough would be keen to supply all users. However, from the viewpoint of drivers and those responsible for the road system, changing the power source is an incremental improvement, not a disruptive innovation (although electric vehicles would be disruptive for the oil industry). The key question for this chapter is whether advances in technology will allow us to travel significantly faster or very differently, whether through innovations that lead to new kinds of vehicle or new digital applications that provide trip information.

Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries by Safi Bahcall

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Astronomia nova, behavioural economics, Boeing 747, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dunbar number, Edmond Halley, Gary Taubes, Higgs boson, hypertext link, industrial research laboratory, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Johannes Kepler, Jony Ive, knowledge economy, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, PageRank, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, prediction markets, pre–internet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, six sigma, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, tulip mania, Wall-E, wikimedia commons, yield management

So what do these stories, and the stories from earlier in the book, tell us? USE “DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION” TO ANALYZE HISTORY; NURTURE LOONSHOTS TO TEST BELIEFS In an article addressing recent controversy about the notion of disruptive innovation, Christensen explains why Uber is not disruptive, by his definition, and why the iPhone also began as a sustaining innovation. In chapter 3, we saw that American Airlines—a large incumbent, not a new entrant—led the airline industry after deregulation with many brilliant “sustaining” innovations targeted to high-end customers. Hundreds of low-cost, specialty airline startups, “disruptive innovators,” failed. If the transistor, Google, the iPhone, Uber, Walmart, IKEA, and American Airlines’ Big Data and other industry-transforming ideas were all initially sustaining innovations, and hundreds of “disruptive innovators” fail, perhaps the distinction between sustaining vs. disruptive, while interesting academically or in hindsight, is less critical for steering businesses in real time than other notions.

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Disruption This afterword is mostly for business-theory or innovation-theory junkies who may have heard of, or even occasionally make use of, the term disruptive or the term (which causes me even more stomach pain) disruptive innovation. First, to get something out of the way quickly: the two types of loonshots described in chapter 3 are unrelated to what Louis Galambos in 1992 called “adaptive” vs. “formative” innovations, and Clayton Christensen in 1997 called “sustaining” vs. “disruptive” innovations. The two loonshots distinguish between a new strategy (S-type) and a new product or technology (P-type). Galambos and Christensen distinguish between improvements to existing products (sustaining) and technologies that eventually significantly alter some market (disruptive).

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ONLINE SEARCH To fast-forward a few decades: could Google, when it began, say that it had developed a disruptive innovation? Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s improved algorithm for prioritizing internet search results, PageRank, was incrementally more helpful to users than results from the many other existing search engines. It was a “sustaining” innovation, by the definitions above. WALMART When Sam Walton opened stores in rural areas, far from big cities, was he thinking it might be a strategic, disruptive innovation? “Man, I was all set to become a big-city department store owner,” he wrote about opening his first store.

The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion by John Hagel Iii, John Seely Brown

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, Black Swan, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, future of work, game design, George Gilder, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, loose coupling, Louis Pasteur, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Marc Benioff, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Network effects, old-boy network, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart transportation, software as a service, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, TSMC, Yochai Benkler

Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor have painted a very compelling picture of the potential to pursue disruptive innovation strategies.9 These strategies can generate enormous wealth for the innovator but, in general, they are different from the strategies we are discussing on two important dimensions. First, they often involve a single company making significant commitments to a disruptive innovation in technology or business design, rather than an individual or group bringing together very large numbers of companies to make complementary investments. Think of the iconic examples of disruptive innovators such as Nucor or Southwest Airlines. These companies bet big, but they largely bet alone.

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On one hand, for those who win in pursuing disruptive innovations, the prize is very large because it does not have to be shared with anyone else. On the other hand, there is little opportunity to manage risk by sharing investment across large numbers of players. These shapers often literally bet the company and live or die based on the outcome of the bet. The second key difference in disruptive innovation strategies is that these strategies motivate others to invest and move based on negative incentives. The basic proposition is that, if others do not invest to adopt the disruptive innovations, they will die. Imminent death does focus the mind.

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In past technology revolutions, a new technology or cluster of technologies emerged in a burst of innovation, experienced rapid performance improvement for a short period of time, and then quickly began to experience a flattening of the performance-improvement curve. This pattern enabled a process of stabilization to follow the initial disruptive innovation. As the performance curve of the technology began to flatten, it provided an opportunity for infrastructure to stabilize once innovators discovered the best way to organize the infrastructure to deliver the distinctive capabilities of the new technology. Similarly, as the infrastructure stabilized, it helped the rest of society to stabilize as well—once it discovered a new set of practices to harness the potential of the new infrastructure.

Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors by Edward Niedermeyer

autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, fake it until you make it, family office, financial engineering, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Google Earth, housing crisis, hype cycle, Hyperloop, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, OpenAI, Paul Graham, peak oil, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, short selling, short squeeze, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, tail risk, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, vertical integration, WeWork, work culture , Zipcar

This pattern repeats itself so regularly because almost every innovation in the automotive space is what is known as a “sustaining innovation” rather than a “disruptive innovation.” Clayton Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor who coined these terms, defines sustaining innovations as “innovations that make a product or service perform better in ways that customers in the mainstream market already value,” which indeed describes the evolution of the auto industry. “Disruptive innovations,” on the other hand, “create an entirely new market through the introduction of a new kind of product or service,” which are out of step with the values of both established consumer markets and industry leaders.

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This makes electric drive no more “disruptive” than any of the technologies that have steadily improved the efficiency and emissions of internal combustion vehicles over the last century, most of which have been widely diffused across the industry without leaving a single automaker with a sustainable technological advantage. One of the great ironies of Tesla is that it is so widely seen as being a disruptive innovator when in fact it just barely missed the opportunity to fully capitalize on what is likely to be the first truly disruptive innovation to hit the auto industry in a century: shared autonomous vehicles. By enabling an access model instead of an ownership model, in which privately owned cars are replaced by on-demand access to fleets of self-driving mobility pods, autonomous drive has the clear potential to disrupt both consumption patterns and the fundamentals of the business.

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Twitter, October 25, 2018. https://twitter.com/TeslaCharts/status/1055420713253982208 Chapter 17 225a projected capacitive touchscreen: Andrew Rassweiler, Mark Boyadjis, and Stephanie Brinley. “Tesla Motors: A case study in disruptive innovation.” IHS Markit, October 7, 2014. https://ihsmarkit.com/research-analysis/q14-tesla-motors-a-case-study-in-disruptive-innovation.html 228a dashboard can reach: Hussain H. Al-Kayiem. “Study on the Thermal Accumulation and Distribution Inside a Parked Car Cabin.” American Journal of Applied Sciences, January 2010. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/46179184_Study_on_the_Thermal_Accumulation_and_Distribution_Inside_a_Parked_Car_Cabin 228even without help from: Cristian Sorin Popescu.

Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire by Bruce Nussbaum

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, declining real wages, demographic dividend, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, follow your passion, game design, gamification, gentrification, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, industrial robot, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gruber, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lone genius, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Minsky moment, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QR code, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, reshoring, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, The Design of Experiments, the High Line, The Myth of the Rational Market, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, We are the 99%, Y Combinator, young professional, Zipcar

Their success had nothing to do with the number of patents or the amount spent on R&D, and so it was impossible to measure these companies using the same metrics of more established organizations. That made it clear that something else was happening, something else was responsible for these big disruptive innovations, something that we hadn’t yet discovered how to quantify. Frustrated, I began asking around, starting with my contacts at a number of consultancies whose job it was to help existing companies become more creative. They were reluctant to talk about it at first, but eventually they began to share the same surprising truth: They had an incredibly low success rate when it came to helping companies usher in the kind of transformative innovation they were seeking.

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Years after I initially began these conversations, the heads of two top innovation firms would tell me that of the hundreds of projects they worked on each year, only a handful actually worked. After spending most of my career covering innovation, developing tools to help companies and investors measure it, and believing that companies really could become more innovative, I was shocked. And every bit as frustrated. What was this all about? Why were all the hugely disruptive innovations coming out of left field? Why were companies that were spending money and time on all the right things failing to come up with the same kinds of life-altering products and services that some twentysomethings could do with zero budget? How could the millions spent on metrics and measuring by big organizations generate far less innovation than some talented computer programmers and their buddies?

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But truly creative people don’t stop at the idea; they make the pivot into creation. By moving beyond the creative idea in order to create new products and businesses, Pivoting is a way of reprising creativity’s crucial role in capitalism as a driver of innovation and growth. But how? Most disruptive innovations come from individuals who are leading a cause and who’ve inspired a loyal following to get involved in that community. And yet our investments into innovation don’t always reflect that. Most of our efforts to promote creativity go to older, established corporations, where incremental innovation is, at best, the result.

Think Like an Engineer: Use Systematic Thinking to Solve Everyday Challenges & Unlock the Inherent Values in Them by Mushtak Al-Atabi

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Black Swan, Blue Ocean Strategy, business climate, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive bias, corporate social responsibility, dematerialisation, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, follow your passion, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, invention of the wheel, iterative process, James Dyson, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, Lean Startup, mirror neurons, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, remote working, shareholder value, six sigma, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, systems thinking

Taking the smartphone market as an example, there was a time when the iPhone represented the high end of the market with other imitators satisfying the lower end of the market, selling cheaper but with a lower brand and performance offering. Currently the differentiation between various brands is becoming more difficult, and smartphones are almost becoming a commodity. Disruptive Innovation (Source: Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen) Clayton Christensen in his book ‘The Innovator’s Dilemma’ presented an interesting theory of what he calls “disruptive innovation.” He explains how a new product, service, or company may drive existing prominent market players out of the market and conquer their market share. This happens by addressing market segments that are below the existing lower end of the market.

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43 3.2 Emotional Intelligence 45 3.2.1 Self Awareness 46 3.2.2 Self-Management 48 3.2.3 Social Awareness 53 3.2.4 Relationship Management 58 Chapter 4 67 Conceive 4.1 Preparing to Conceive 69 4.2 Ideation: The Art of Idea Generation 71 4.2.1 Brainstorming 71 4.2.2 Random Entry 74 4.2.3 Trimming 77 4.2.4 Blue Ocean Strategy 78 4.2.5 Trend Recognition 82 4.2.6 Biomimicry and Learning from Nature 89 4.3 Concept Evaluation and Selection 89 Chapter 5 93 Design 5.1 Function and Form 93 5.2 Design Process 94 5.2.1 System Architecture 95 5.2.2 Configuration Design 97 5.2.3 Integrated Design 98 5.2.4 Detailed Design 98 5.3 Design Optimisation and Trade Offs 99 5.4 Other Design Considerations 100 Chapter 6 104 Implement 6.1 Hardware Manufacturing Process 104 6.2 Software Implementing Process 105 6.3 Hardware Software Integration 106 6.4 Testing, Verification, Validation, and Certification 106 Chapter 7 110 Operate 7.1 Sustainable and Safe Operations 110 7.2 Operations Management 110 7.3 Training and Operations 111 7.4 The Birth of the Checklist 111 7.5 Preventive Maintenance 115 7.6 System Improvement and Evolution 115 7.7 End of Life Issues 115 7.8 CDIO Case Studies 115 7.8.1 Taylor’s Racing Team 116 7.8.2 Women in Engineering 121 7.8.3 CDIO Beyond Engineering 124 Chapter 8 126 Ergonomics: Human Centred Design 8.1 Design for Ease of Use and Operation 127 8.1.1 Affordance, Visibility and Feedback 128 8.1.2 Constraints 130 8.1.3 Mapping 131 8.2 Anthropometric Measurements 132 8.3 Work Musculo-Skeletal Disorders (WMSDs) 133 8.4 Cognitive Ergonomics 133 8.4.1 Nudges 134 8.4.2 Framing 134 8.4.3 Anchoring 136 Chapter 9 137 Communication and Teamwork 9.1 Communication Strategies 137 9.2 Process Documentation 145 9.2.1 Logbooks 145 9.2.2 Minutes of Meetings 146 9.2.3 Technical Reports 146 9.2.4 Communication via Email 148 9.2.5 Operation Manuals 149 9.3 Teamwork 150 9.3.1 Selecting the Team Members 150 9.3.2 Core Competency 151 9.3.3 Organisation Chart 152 9.3.4 Team Evolution 153 9.3.5 Team Building Exercises 156 9.4 Connections and Networking 156 Chapter 10 159 Managing Projects for Success 10.1 Project Initiating 160 10.2 Project Planning 162 10.2.1 Cost and Resources Estimation 163 10.2.2 Time Estimation 163 10.2.3 Risk Management 168 10.3 Project Executing 169 10.4 Project Monitoring and Controlling 169 10.5 Project Closing 169 10.6 Project Stakeholders Management 170 Chapter 11 173 Entrepreneurship and Innovation 11.1 Philosophy of Entrepreneurship 174 11.2 Business Value 176 11.2.1 Customer Value (Value Proposition) 176 11.2.2 Shareholder Value 177 11.2.3 Employee Value 178 11.2.4 Suppliers and Partners Value 178 11.2.5 Society Value 178 11.3 Business Model (Entrepreneurial Ecosystem) 178 11.3.1 Customer 180 11.3.2 Channels 180 11.3.3 Revenue and Cost 180 11.3.4 Resources 181 11.3.5 Business Activities 181 11.3.6 Partnerships 181 11.3.7 Competitors 182 11.3.8 Business Environment 182 11.4 Business Plan 182 11.5 CDIO for the Market 184 11.5.1 Market Lifecycle of Products and Services 184 11.5.2 Market Evolution and Disruptive Innovation 186 11.5.3 Market Penetration 187 11.5.4 Customers Power in a Digital World 189 11.6 Lean Entrepreneurship 191 11.7 Funding Entrepreneurship 193 Chapter 12 198 Return on Failure 12.1 Learning and Failure 200 12.2 Failing Smart 203 12.3 Failure, Risk and Uncertainty 204 12.4 Education and Encouraging Failure 205 Chapter 13 209 Structured P Solving 13.1 Challenge Identification and Formulation 209 13.2 Root Cause Analysis 210 13.2.1 The 5 Whys 210 13.2.2 The 4 M Method 211 13.2.3 Fishbone Diagram 213 13.3 Estimation and Quantitative Analysis 214 13.4 Final Steps 215 Chapter 14 216 Engineering Holistic Education 14.1 Holistic Education 218 14.2 Learning Beyond the School 220 14.3 Mission Zero: A Vision for Higher Education 224 14.3.1 Zero Tuition Fees 224 14.3.2 Zero Impact on the Job Market 226 14.4 Engineering a Culture Change: Happiness Index 226 Epilogue 228 An Invitation Foreword Whether you are a professional engineer, an aspiring engineer, an enthusiast of engineering or someone interested in ideas, this book has something to offer.

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Product Adoption Lifecycle (Source: “Crossing the Chasm” by Geoffrey Moore) To cross the chasm, a product needs to impress the innovators enough for them to be excited about it and talk about it to their friends and networks. If the innovators become the ambassadors for a product, they can produce enough momentum, together with the early adopters, to cross the chasm. 11.5.2 Market Evolution and Disruptive Innovation A product starts its life with a certain performance level. As times goes by, often the performance improves. As more providers for similar products come into existence, a market range normally develops with high-end and low-end offerings. With time, the difference between the high-end and the low-end diminishes; that is when the product becomes an undifferentiated commodity.

A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas by Warren Berger

Airbnb, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean water, disruptive innovation, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fear of failure, food desert, Google X / Alphabet X, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ray Kurzweil, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Toyota Production System, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Zipcar

In an increasingly technical marketplace, if you could take a product that was expensive, complex, and exclusive and make it affordable and accessible, you could open up a mass market and change the game—toppling the established leaders. But why were only the newcomers seizing this opportunity? Why weren’t the established leaders, with all their know-how and resources, able to dominate the low end of the market as well as the high end? Christensen came to see this as a dilemma: To pursue disruptive innovation at the low end, companies would have to move away from all they had worked so hard to build. As Christensen puts it, they faced this deceptively tricky question: Should we make better products that we can sell for higher profits to our best customers—or make worse products that none of our customers would buy, and that would ruin our margins?

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As Christensen puts it, they faced this deceptively tricky question: Should we make better products that we can sell for higher profits to our best customers—or make worse products that none of our customers would buy, and that would ruin our margins? If you were a smart business leader, you naturally opted for the former. And in making that seemingly logical choice, you sealed your company’s fate. After Christensen published his theory in the bestselling book The Innovator’s Dilemma, the idea of focusing on “disruptive innovation” at the low end of markets became standard business practice, particularly in Silicon Valley, where Christensen’s book was, for a time, a kind of innovator’s bible. While it’s a testament to Christensen’s keen questioning ability that he was able to find and pursue the Whys and What Ifs that led to his discovery, nevertheless one can’t help wondering: Why didn’t others—particularly the smart people running those companies he studied—see the “innovator’s dilemma” themselves?

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It showed “questioning” to be one of five key characteristics (and in some ways the most important) associated with being a successful, creative business leader. The results appeared initially in the Harvard Business Review in December 2009 and later in Dyer, Gregersen, and Christensen’s The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2011). 8 The neurologist John Kounios observes . . . From my interview with Kounios, November 2012. 9 “We’ve transitioned into always transitioning” . . . The general principle of constant transitioning was discussed in my interview with Brown, March 4, 2013.

The Content Trap: A Strategist's Guide to Digital Change by Bharat Anand

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Benjamin Mako Hill, Bernie Sanders, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, electricity market, Eyjafjallajökull, fulfillment center, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, late fees, managed futures, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Minecraft, multi-sided market, Network effects, post-work, price discrimination, publish or perish, QR code, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, social web, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuart Kauffman, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, two-sided market, ubercab, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

“Movie Rental Business: Blockbuster, Netflix, and Redbox.” HBS No. KEL616. Kellogg School of Management, rev. March 2, 2016. Christensen, Clayton M. Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns. Expanded ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2011. ———. The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. Boston: Harvard Business Publishing, 1997, 2000. Christensen, Clayton M., Michael E. Raynor, and Rory McDonald. “What Is Disruptive Innovation?” Harvard Business Review, December 2015. Chung, Kevin Y. C., Timothy P. Derdenger, and Kannan Srinivasan. “Economic Value of Celebrity Endorsements: Tiger Woods’ Impact on Sales of Nike Golf Balls.”

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Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Boston: Harvard Business Publishing, 1997, 2000). far outdistanced Christensen’s definition Clayton M. Christensen, Michael E. Raynor, and Rory McDonald, “What Is Disruptive Innovation?,” Harvard Business Review , December 2015. a law of nature See also Joshua Gans, The Disruption Dilemma (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016); Joshua Gans, “The Other Disruption,” Harvard Business Review, March 2016; Andrew King and Baljir Baatarogtokh, “How Useful Is the Theory of Disruptive Innovation?,” MIT Sloan Management Review, Fall 2015. “I’m so excited to be starting” Layla Siraj, email message to author, June 2014; Siraj kindly agreed to allow me to reproduce her email here.

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And although these connections bestow success, they are also hard to unravel and change easily. These reasons for organizational failure have been understood for a while. As we proceeded with our efforts, we were acutely aware of them. But, over the past decade, one idea had risen above all others in popular discourse: Clay Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation, generally regarded as one of the most influential ideas in management during the last decade. Christensen himself had predicted the disruption of K–12 education ten years earlier in his book Disrupting Class . By now, analysts, entrepreneurs, and investors were warning about the impending disruption to higher education as well.

The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andy Kessler, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, c2.com, call centre, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, clean water, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, digital divide, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Firefox, folksonomy, Free Software Foundation, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, illegal immigration, index card, informal economy, information security, Internet Archive, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, license plate recognition, loose coupling, mail merge, Morris worm, national security letter, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, post-materialism, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert X Cringely, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, software patent, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, wikimedia commons, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

In it, market leaders tended to be very good at quickly and successfully adopting some technological advancements, yet were entirely left behind by upstarts. To explain the discrepancy, he created a taxonomy of “sustaining” and “disruptive” innovations. When technological innovations are consistent with the performance trajectory of established market leaders—that is, when they are a more efficient way of doing what they already do—alert leaders will be quick to develop and utilize such “sustaining” innovations. It is with disruptive innovations that the market leaders will lag behind. These innovations are not in the path of what the company is already doing well. Indeed, Christensen found that the innovations which market leaders were the worst at exploiting were “technologically straightforward, consisting of off-the-shelf components put together in a product architecture that was often simpler than prior approaches.

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They offered a different package of attributes valued only in emerging markets remote from, and unimportant to, the mainstream.”25 It is not the case, Christensen argues, that these large companies lack the technological competence to deploy a new technology, but rather that their managements choose to focus on their largest and most profitable customers, resulting in an unwillingness to show “downwardvision and mobility.”26 Subsequent authors have built on this theory, arguing that a failure to innovate disruptively is not simply an issue of management, but the organizational inability of large firms to respond to changes in consumer preferences caused by such disruptive innovations. Established firms are structurally reluctant to investigate whether an innovative product would be marketable to a sector outside what they perceive to be their traditional market.27 They want to ride a wave, and they fail to establish alternatives or plumb new markets even as competitors begin to do so.

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Echoing Christensen and others, he points out that firms too often think that their own internal marketing and R&D departments know best, and that users cannot easily improve on what they manufacture. Von Hippel then goes further, offering a model that integrates user innovation with manufacturer innovation (Figure 4.3). Von Hippel’s analysis says that users can play a critical role in adapting technologies to entirely new purposes—a source of disruptive innovation. They come up with ideas before there is widespread demand, and they vindicate their ideas sufficiently to get others interested. When interest gets big enough, companies can then step in to smooth out the rough edges and fully commercialize the innovation. Von Hippel has compiled an extensive catalog of user innovation.

The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age by Robert Wachter

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Airbnb, Atul Gawande, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Checklist Manifesto, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cognitive load, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Firefox, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, general purpose technology, Google Glasses, human-factors engineering, hype cycle, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Internet of things, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lifelogging, Marc Benioff, medical malpractice, medical residency, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, pets.com, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Hendricks, Robert Solow, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, The future is already here, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Toyota Production System, Uber for X, US Airways Flight 1549, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yogi Berra

It is a must read for everyone—patients, clinicians, technology designers, and policy makers.” —Maureen Bisognano President and CEO, Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) “An engaging, accessible, and terribly important book by one of our finest medical writers. The electronic health record not only is the most disruptive innovation in the history of healthcare, but will also prove to be transformative. In his inimitable mix of conversation, reporting, and insightful analysis, Bob Wachter explains to you why. A must read for healthcare professionals and the public alike.” —Lucian Leape, MD Professor, Harvard School of Public Health and Chair, Lucian Leape Institute of the National Patient Safety Foundation “The Digital Doctor truly defines today’s epoch of technological transformation in healthcare.

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Patients are now in the loop—many of them get to see their laboratory and pathology results before their physician does; some are even reading their doctor’s notes—yet they remain woefully unprepared to handle their hard-fought empowerment. While someday the computerization of medicine will surely be that long-awaited “disruptive innovation,” today it’s often just plain disruptive: of the doctor-patient relationship, of clinicians’ professional interactions and work flow, and of the way we measure and try to improve things. I’d never heard the term unanticipated consequences in my professional world until a few years ago, and now we use it all the time, since we— yes, even the insiders—are constantly astounded by the speed with which things are changing and the unpredictability of the results.

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(This movement was fostered by the time zone differences, since these “nighthawk” radiologists could read after-hours films during their local daytimes.) Hundreds of hospitals now use nighthawks, and everybody seems happy about it, including the domestic radiologists, who are sleeping soundly while the overnight images are read half a world away. But one wonders whether this is the start of so-called disruptive innovation, the concept made famous by Harvard’s Clay Christensen. Disruption often begins with a fat and happy incumbent content to preserve its existing enviable position in a market. In industries ranging from commercial aviation to steel manufacturing, an upstart comes in and grabs an unattractive part of the market (in this case, nights and weekends).

The Participation Revolution: How to Ride the Waves of Change in a Terrifyingly Turbulent World by Neil Gibb

Abraham Maslow, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, gentrification, gig economy, iterative process, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kodak vs Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, mirror neurons, Network effects, new economy, performance metric, ride hailing / ride sharing, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route, urban renewal, WeWork

It was an extractive process, designed to make the merchants who were trading the coffee rich. In 1995, Clayton Christensen, a professor at the Harvard Business School, introduced the term “disruptive innovation” in his book The Innovator’s Dilemma. As the twin forces of digital technology and globalisation have shaken up and disrupted just about every aspect of our lives in the 21st century, disruptive innovation has become the rallying cry of a generation. Disruption, we are told, is the source of breakthroughs, transformation, and spectacular success. But when I tracked back to the source of innovation of the so-called disruptive companies like GoPro, what I found had nothing to do with disruption.

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In 1995, Clayton Christensen, a professor at the Harvard Business School, introduced the term “disruptive innovation” in his book The Innovator’s Dilemma. What Christensen was referring to in his book’s title was how, at certain points in history, the emergence of new and radical technologies has totally disrupted established business models and businesses – in some cases, completely sweeping them away. Exactly what happened to Kodak. As the twin forces of digital technology and globalisation have shaken up and disrupted just about every aspect of our lives in the 21st century, disruptive innovation has become the rallying cry of a generation.

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As the twin forces of digital technology and globalisation have shaken up and disrupted just about every aspect of our lives in the 21st century, disruptive innovation has become the rallying cry of a generation. Everywhere you look, books and articles are trumpeting this new religion; disruption is the means to success, fame, and fortune. Emotive as it is as a concept, though, compelling speakers at conferences to thump the lectern and use big bold fonts, disruptive innovation is not what made Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger so spectacularly successful with Instagram. In fact, it couldn’t be further from it. The subtitle of Christensen’s book – “When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail” – points to why. What Christensen was shedding light on was not the source of the innovation, but its side effect: why great firms fail, not why these new innovations take off.

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World by Meredith Broussard

"Susan Fowler" uber, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, Dennis Ritchie, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker Ethic, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, life extension, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Saturday Night Live, school choice, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, TechCrunch disrupt, Tesla Model S, the High Line, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, work culture , yottabyte

Brown, “Nearly a Third of Millennials Have Used Venmo to Pay for Drugs.” 13. Newman, “Who’s Buying Drugs, Sex, and Booze on Venmo? This Site Will Tell You.” III Working Together 10 On the Startup Bus Technochauvinists love disruptive innovation. Popularized by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen in his 1997 book The Innovator’s Dilemma, disruptive innovation is allegedly the technological tidal wave that sweeps away the competition and results in huge profits. Innovation—and disruption, come to think of it—is usually connected to young people. Ask an executive who he imagines as the ultimate innovator, and odds are he’ll paint a picture of a twenty-something computer genius in a hoodie who’s writing code to make the next billion-dollar startup.

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What he means, or perhaps hopes, is that young people can come up with ideas so new, so fresh, so original, that they create an entirely new market: new products to sell, new desire from consumers, a new facet to an existing industry—or a new industry altogether. There’s a reason that the Economist called disruptive innovation “the most influential business idea of recent years.”1 Just think of all the dollars attached. This hypothetical business executive might also say something about the power of collaboration and how getting creative people together in a room with a whiteboard can create disruptive innovation. I wanted to see an innovation process from start to finish to find out how much truth there is to these kinds of assumptions. I had a choice: I could join a team in an office for months, helping a team of hackers and business strategists launch a new app or software product into the world—or I could watch the same cycle occur over the course of five days.

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Hackathoners chat about tech-company valuations like regular people talk about sports statistics. Instacart was the Startup Bus success story: its founders met through the bus and eventually started a company together. Instacart had grown to the point where it was worth $2 billion, as at least a dozen people told me during the trip. Stories like this keep the disruptive innovation myth alive. By the time the bus arrived at our hotel in Nashville, my team was wrecked: too much junk food, not enough sleep. But our code worked, and we had a presentation written, and we were ready to see what would happen. On the morning of the qualifiers, all the teams piled onto the grimy New York bus to head to the competition location, Studio 615, a warehouse event space in northern Nashville.

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure by Tim Harford

An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Wiles, banking crisis, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Boeing 747, business logic, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, Deep Water Horizon, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fermat's Last Theorem, financial engineering, Firefox, food miles, Gerolamo Cardano, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Harrison: Longitude, knowledge worker, loose coupling, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Netflix Prize, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, PageRank, Piper Alpha, profit motive, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade route, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Virgin Galactic, web application, X Prize, zero-sum game

When the US Army faced the ‘disruptive innovation’ of guerrilla warfare in Vietnam, there was great reluctance to accept that it had changed the nature of the game, making obsolete the Army’s hard-won expertise in industrial warfare. As one senior officer said, ‘I’ll be damned if I permit the United States army, its institutions, its doctrine, and its traditions to be destroyed just to win this lousy war.’ That is exactly how senior executives must feel when their cutting-edge, market-leading business finds itself being disrupted by a foolish-looking new technology. A sufficiently disruptive innovation bypasses almost everybody who matters at a company: the Rolodex full of key customers becomes useless; the old skills are no longer called for; decades of industry experience count for nothing.

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What is striking is the difficulty Microsoft had with this transition, even though it had bought the leading webmail service, Hotmail, quite early in the game, and even though webmail wasn’t a complicated technology for Microsoft software engineers to master. Yet Hotmail’s features were eclipsed by those of Google’s Gmail. Disruptive innovations are disruptive precisely because the new technology doesn’t appeal to the traditional customers: it is different and for their purposes, it’s inferior. But for a small niche of new customers the new disruptive product is exactly what is needed. They want smaller, cheaper hard drives, or cameras that produce digital files, or email that you can access on any computer – and they are willing to tolerate the fact that the new product is inferior to the old one along all the traditional dimensions.

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Microsoft bought Hotmail, yes – but it was always going to be hard for Microsoft to pay more attention to Hotmail than to Outlook. Microsoft’s core corporate customers regarded webmail as an irrelevance. Google’s users did not. Google only made web applications, and Gmail was a natural fit. We already know one possible solution for corporations faced with a potentially disruptive innovation: a skunk works, a sort of corporate version of Lübeck, in which the regular culture and priorities and politics of the old corporation do not apply. Lockheed’s Skunk Works got its name (originally ‘skonk works’) because it began life inside a circus tent pitched next to a foul-smelling plastics factory.

Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse by Adrian Wooldridge

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Swan, blood diamond, borderless world, business climate, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Exxon Valdez, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, George Gilder, global supply chain, Golden arches theory, hobby farmer, industrial cluster, intangible asset, It's morning again in America, job satisfaction, job-hopping, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meritocracy, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Norman Macrae, open immigration, patent troll, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, vertical integration, wealth creators, women in the workforce, young professional, Zipcar

People who are armed with these facts will put constant pressure on public services to explain and improve. The second idea goes under the very ungentlemanly name of disruptive innovation. Clayton Christensen made his reputation looking at the way disruptive innovators have reconfigured markets and boosted productivity in the private sector. More recently, he has devoted a lot of his energy to the public sector, most provocatively to education. In Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, he argues that the education system was designed for a world where most students go on to do repetitive jobs and where teachers were confronted by large classes and confined by the technology of “chalk and talk.”6 But the information revolution is about to disrupt this model: the arrival of ever cheaper and ever more powerful computers is making it possible to customize courses for the needs of individual students.

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These days the third world is known as the emerging markets, the Che Guevara T-shirts are made in China, and the wretched of the earth are enjoying growth rates that are the envy of the former colonial powers. Moreover, these emerging markets are likely to shake things up not only in their own backyards but in rich countries, too. Clayton Christensen has coined the term “disruptive innovation” for new products that slash prices and new processes that radically change the way they are made and delivered. Today, many of the most disruptive innovations hail from emerging markets. They will make a bigger difference to life in the West than lean production, the previous great disruptive management innovation from the East. There are four reasons why things will move faster and further this time.

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Japan invented lean production and almost destroyed the American car and electronics industries. Now the emerging markets are developing their own distinctive management ideas, and Western companies will increasingly find themselves learning from their rivals. People who used to think of the emerging world as a source of cheap labor must now recognize that it can be a source of disruptive innovation as well. The Charms of Frugal Innovation General Electric’s healthcare laboratory in Bangalore contains some of the company’s most sophisticated products—from giant body scanners that can accommodate the bulkiest American football players to state-of-the-art intensive-care units that can nurse the tiniest premature babies.

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alfred Russel Wallace, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, barriers to entry, British Empire, Burning Man, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, corporate raider, creative destruction, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Eben Moglen, Ford Model T, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Menlo Park, open economy, packet switching, PageRank, profit motive, radical decentralization, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, seminal paper, sexual politics, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

To understand this point we need grasp the difference between two types of innovation: “sustaining” and “disruptive,” the distinction best described by innovation theorist Clayton Christensen. Sustaining innovations are improvements that make the product better, but do not threaten its market. The disruptive innovation, conversely, threatens to displace a product altogether. It is the difference between the electric typewriter, which improved on the typewriter, and the word processor, which supplanted it.5 Another advantage of the outside inventor is less a matter of the imagination than of his being a disinterested party.

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In this sense, Bell’s alliance with Hubbard, a sworn enemy of Western Union, the dominant monopolist, was all-important. For it was Hubbard who made Bell’s invention into an effort to unseat Western Union. I am not saying, by any means, that invention is solely the province of loners and that everyone else’s inspiration is suppressed. But this isn’t a book about better mousetraps. The Cycle is powered by disruptive innovations that upend once thriving industries, bankrupt the dominant powers, and change the world. Such innovations are exceedingly rare, but they are what makes the Cycle go. Let’s return to Bell in his Boston laboratory. Doubtless he had some critical assets, including a knowledge of acoustics. His laboratory notebook, which can be read online, suggests a certain diligence.

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Whatever technological reality we live with is the result of tooth-and-claw industrial combat. And the battles are more decisive than those in which the dominant power attempts to co-opt the technologies that could destroy it, Goliath attempting to seize the slingshot. Western Union, despite its great size and scale, was vulnerable to the same force as every other business: disruptive innovation. No sooner had the firm realized the potential of the Bell company’s technology to overthrow the telegraph monopoly than it went into Kronos mode, attempting to kill or devour Bell. It did not happen instantaneously. At the very beginning, in 1877, the Bell Company probably seemed more a source of comic relief than a threat to Western Union.

Frugal Innovation: How to Do Better With Less by Jaideep Prabhu Navi Radjou

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, circular economy, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Computer Numeric Control, connected car, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, fail fast, financial exclusion, financial innovation, gamification, global supply chain, IKEA effect, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, low cost airline, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, megacity, minimum viable product, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, planned obsolescence, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, reshoring, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, software as a service, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, value engineering, vertical integration, women in the workforce, work culture , X Prize, yield management, Zipcar

To turn sceptical senior managers into sponsors, R&D teams must hone their business-development skills to quantify their invention’s market value and offer a profitable go-to-market strategy. For instance, the R&D teams at companies like Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft have all included microeconomists to help design business models, pricing strategies and alliances for disruptive innovations. And with the rise of emerging economies like India, China and Brazil, R&D solutions should be fine-tuned to meet the unique market conditions and customer needs in different regions. For instance, at PepsiCo, a multinational food and beverage corporation, the R&D team is deeply attuned to the business needs of its different geographical areas, having set up regionally focused R&D centres of excellence in China, Mexico and the US.

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In the automotive sector, Renault-Nissan is using its Indian operations to learn about frugal engineering and applies the ideas across the firm’s chain of R&D operations including in France and Japan. In food and agribusiness, PepsiCo has located its Global Value Innovation Centre in India with the aim of spreading disruptive innovation around the world. In health care, GE is creating a whole new generation of affordable medical devices in its Indian and Chinese R&D centres for sale not just locally but in western markets too. Furthermore, GE Healthcare has changed its global structure. Previously managed in Europe, the US and Japan, with emerging economies as sub-regions, the firm now has six equal regions that include India and China, each with a CEO who reports to the global GE CEO.

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When leaders cannot dictate, employees must be able to co-operate to get things done. Of course, the company can help by rewarding co-operation. “Blame is not for failure but for failing to help or ask for help,” notes Knudstorp. Another way to empower staff is to create an unstructured playground where creativity does not violate company rules. (Disruptive innovation, after all, requires people to be disruptive.) Henry Ford, founder of the eponymous motor company, was anything but playful – you would be hard-pressed to find a smiling photo of the man. He was most famous for standardising and automating manufacturing and creating hierarchical structures to achieve economies of scale by mass-producing cars.

Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success by Shane Snow

3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, attribution theory, augmented reality, barriers to entry, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, fail fast, Fellow of the Royal Society, Filter Bubble, Ford Model T, Google X / Alphabet X, hive mind, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, popular electronics, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, social bookmarking, Steve Jobs, superconnector, vertical integration

Harvard management professor Clayton M. Christensen furthered this concept in the mid-’90s when he coined the term “disruptive innovation.” Disruptive innovation is when the introduction of a lower-cost product steals market share from existing players, like when e-mail usurped postal mail (how much would you spend a month if every e-mail cost the price of a postage stamp?) or when Craigslist replaced costly classified newspaper ads with free Internet listings. The key feature of disruptively innovative products is cost savings (either time or money). But the key ingredient behind the scenes of every disruptive product is simplification.

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I’ve found used incubators on eBay and from hospitals ($1,000–4,000), but in limited supply. 158 “We started making a cheaper glass box”: Shrabonti Bagchi, “Saving Little Lives,” Times of India, September 19, 2011, http://epaper.timesofindia.com/Repository/ml.asp?Ref=VE9JQkcvMjAxMS8wOS8xOSNBcjAwNDAw (accessed February 17, 2014). 159 “We realized something was wrong”: Ibid. 161 the Latin innovare: “Innovate,” Merriam-Webster, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/innovate (accessed February 17, 2014). The classic book about disruptive innovation is, of course, Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma (HarperBusiness, 1997). I have drawn heavily from Christensen’s ideas in various parts of this book and in my business career. 162 Tech writer Brian Lam: David Carr’s 2012 profile of Blam will make you want to move to Hawaii, too: “Buffeted by the Web, but Now Riding It,” New York Times, December 16, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/17/business/media/buffeted-by-the-web-but-now-riding-it.html (accessed February 17, 2014). 162 Blam will simply tell you: Brian Lam’s TheWirecutter has since expanded to several writers (to spread the load and ensure enough surf time, naturally).

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See superconnectors constraints, 164–66 constructionism, 89–90 constructive interference, 106–7 conventional wisdom application to rocket science, 173 breaking patterns to surpass, 4–5 hard work and luck lead to success, 121–22 Cuban Revolution, 123–31, 136–38 Daisy the Dinosaur (programming app), 89 Dan (app founder), 58 Dane, Erik, 108 da Vinci, Leonardo, 234n167 death is not failure, 71–75 decision-making, 80, 84–85, 108–10, 164, 224n108 Dell, Michael, 4 Dell Computers, 204n4 DeNisi, Angelo, 68 Denton, Nick, 162 depression, dealing with issues of, 50–51, 143–47, 229n145 “Design for Extreme Affordability” (Chen), 157, 164–65 destructive interference, 106–7 Devlin, Keith, 91 “DHH.” See Heinemeier Hansson, David DiFuria, Joan, 146–47 Digg (social news website), 136 disruptive innovation, 161 Doohan, James, 174 “Double Rainbow” (video), 141, 156, 229n141, 231n156 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, 163 Dr. Seuss (pen name), 15, 77, 94 & n, 139 Dr. Watson (fictional character), 163 dubstep (dance music), 118–22 Duckworth, Angela, 167 “Dunk in the Dark” (Twitter update), 148–50, 151–52, 155–56 Dyson, Freeman, 87–88, 90–91, 219n87 eBay, 4, 5 education American model, 87–88, 166 Finland success model, 86–87, 93–95, 166–67 improving platform, 98–99 leading children to STEM careers, 89–93 teaching lateral thinking, 95 10X thinking, 192–94, 198 Edwards, D’Wayne, 187–94, 198 Einstein, Albert, 93, 95 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 24–25, 29, 208n19 electronic dance music (EDM), 118–22 Elliott, Martin, 41–42, 45 Embrace (infant warmer), 159–61 emo (punk rock music), 102–4 Facebook, 116 failure dying while going down fighting is not, 71–75 getting feedback from, 66–71, 183–84 learning from lessons of, 57–61 patterns leading to, 61–65 practicing with fear of, 66–67 See also success Fallon, Jimmy, 33–37, 48–50, 141, 210n33, 214n49 Fast Company (magazine), 8 fast followers, 116–17 feedback achieving growth through, 70–71 exemplifying the process, 196 experimenting with the process, 72–75 learning from failure, 55–65 Internet speed and power, 53–55 turning failure into, 183–84 value of critique and interventions, 66–71 “Yes, and” vs.

The Job: The Future of Work in the Modern Era by Ellen Ruppel Shell

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, big-box store, blue-collar work, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, company town, computer vision, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, follow your passion, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, game design, gamification, gentrification, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, human-factors engineering, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, precariat, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban renewal, Wayback Machine, WeWork, white picket fence, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game

This adjustment clearly correlates with top brass making more money (at this writing, Gabe Newell has a reported net worth of $5.5 billion), but its success at spawning innovation is less clear. “Flat hierarchies are supposed to result in disruptive innovation,” Ellsworth said. “But what happened at Valve wasn’t innovative. It was just disruptive.” The concept of “disruptive innovation,” popularized by Harvard Business School economist Clayton Christensen in his 1997 best seller The Innovator’s Dilemma, is all but de rigeur in business circles, particularly in the tech industry. Yet while it’s common for employers to encourage staff to be “disruptive,” what they actually mean by this is uncertain, even, one suspects, to the employers themselves.

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This adjustment clearly correlates Adam Goldstein, “Revenge of the Managers: Labor Cost-Cutting and the Paradoxical Resurgence of Managerialism in the Shareholder Value Era, 1984 to 2001,” American Sociological Review 77, no. 2 (2012): 268–94, http://dx.doi.org/​doi:10.1177/​0003122­412440093. The concept of “disruptive innovation” See, for example, the cartoon strip Dilbert, in which the dog Dogbert, working as a consultant, advises a client, “To survive, you must create disruptive innovations to redefine the market.” Scott Adams, Dilbert, February 16, 2004, http://dilbert.com/​strip/​2004-02-16. “an accusation rather than an irreplaceable” Rosalind H. Williams, The Triumph of Human Empire: Verne, Morris, and Stevenson at the End of the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 193–94.

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As we’ve seen, this “Do now, think later” strategy is not exclusive to IT, but has become pervasive even in fields like journalism and medicine, where increasingly workers are judged not by the depth of their thinking and the weight of their judgment, but by their productivity, as measured by “content” in the case of journalists, and by “caseload” in the case of medical professionals. Many of these “knowledge workers” are left to wonder what real value they offer beyond corralling customers in service to their employers. Some organizations try to maximize productivity and encourage “disruptive” innovation by gathering workers in teams. But among the Finnish group’s most striking conclusions is that our faith in the power of teamwork may be misplaced. Indeed, studies stretching back decades reveal that brainstorming rarely leads to novel solutions, and in fact can discourage innovative thinking.

Dual Transformation: How to Reposition Today's Business While Creating the Future by Scott D. Anthony, Mark W. Johnson

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Apollo 13, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, blockchain, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Internet of things, invention of hypertext, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, long term incentive plan, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, obamacare, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, pez dispenser, recommendation engine, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, software as a service, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, subscription business, the long tail, the market place, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transfer pricing, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Zipcar

The Focus Component Chapter 6 describes how leaders need the clarity to focus on the highest-potential opportunity areas. One of the paradoxes of dual transformation is that leaders need to become less focused as they go about developing winning strategies in those areas. After all, history shows us that sustainable strategies for disruptive innovations emerge from a process of trial-and-error experimentation. The Failure Component A strange idea that has blossomed over the past few years is that failure is generally good. Not so—failure is bad. Who wants to have something not work out? Many types of failure are bad and should be avoided.

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“Come on, guys! Time to go home.” Preparing for the Crises of Dual Transformation By following the guidance described in this book, you should have a robust strategy and a compelling story for what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. The theories on which the guidance is built, particularly the disruptive innovation theory, helps make compelling predictions in the absence of complete data. You also should have underlying metrics that serve as early proof points of success. For Gilbert, that was the growth of his new businesses. Even though they were small, highlighting double-digit growth rates helped reaffirm that the media organization collectively was moving in the right direction.

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Walgreens: Innosight, “A Roadmap for the Future Helps the Pharmacy Giant Widen its Health Care Mission,” http://www.innosight.com/impact-stories/walgreens-case-study.cfm. Sources of nonconsumption: Scott D. Anthony, Mark W. Johnson, Joseph V. Sinfield, and Elizabeth J. Altman, The Innovator’s Guide to Growth: Putting Disruptive Innovation to Work (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2008). Xerox’s transformation B strategy: Clark Gilbert, Matthew Eyring, and Richard N. Foster, “Two Routes to Resilience,” Harvard Business Review, December 2012. ChoiceMed example: Scott D. Anthony, The First Mile: A Launch Manual for Getting Great Ideas Into the Market (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2014).

The Only Game in Town: Central Banks, Instability, and Avoiding the Next Collapse by Mohamed A. El-Erian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, currency peg, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, friendly fire, full employment, future of work, geopolitical risk, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, income inequality, inflation targeting, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Norman Mailer, oil shale / tar sands, price stability, principal–agent problem, quantitative easing, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, yield curve, zero-sum game

We are living through an exciting transformational period, which, by encouraging a shift from narrow product orientations to more holistic solution mindsets, places an increasing premium on companies’ and governments’ ability to respond anytime and anywhere, and to do so in a manner that meets individuals’ expectations for more frequent and broader engagement. So far, quite a bit of the impact of such disruptive innovations has been limited to the spectacular emergence of certain new companies, the deployment of existing assets, and the disruption of specific sectors. But, as we will see in detail shortly, it is just a matter of time before the impact goes macro, fueling the transformation of the broader economic landscape.

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This discomfort relates to the growing difficulties that both national economies and the global system face (and will face) in reconciling in a relatively stable manner five trends that I believe will become more pronounced in the period ahead—namely: • Multi-speed growth; • Multi-track central banking policies; • Growing pricing anomalies, from negative nominal interest rates to the unusual position of having “the U.S. yield curve…now shaped as much by foreign monetary policy as the Fed’s”;2 • Non-economic headwinds; and • The impact of certain disruptive innovations going macro. Together they suggest that, as opposed to the consensus view of a relatively stable low-growth world, we are looking at increasing economic and policy divergences among countries, which, together with prospects for national political and geopolitical disruptions, will make the belly of the distribution a lot less stable.

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But should these influences wane, as they are bound to in the future, markets will have to play rapid catch-up with quite an uncertain and worrisome geopolitical configuration. It is not one that is easy to price in a linear and orderly fashion. CHAPTER 27 A WORLD OF GREATER DIVERGENCE (IV) DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION GOES MACRO “This gap between the potential of an innovation and its widespread adoption is one of those lessons that we learn and then we tend to forget, or we don’t learn it because of inattention to history and its lessons about human and organizational behavior.” —MICHAEL SPENCE We are in the midst of two massive technological transformations—one in the energy sector occasioned by shale, and the other due to a digital revolution that encompasses the innovations in Internet technologies, mobility, applications, and digitalization.

Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World's Most Successful Companies by Charles de Ganahl Koch

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, big-box store, book value, British Empire, business process, commoditize, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, Garrett Hardin, global supply chain, hiring and firing, income per capita, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, low interest rates, oil shale / tar sands, personalized medicine, principal–agent problem, proprietary trading, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Salesforce, Solyndra, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing

And it’s why we have developed MBM, with an aim to become a new type of organization that is the counterparty of choice for every customer, vendor, employee, and community. MBM teaches that we must continually drive constructive change in every aspect of our company or we will fail. As a result, we constantly pursue disruptive innovations and opportunities through internal and external development as well as acquisition. Similarly, we shed businesses and assets that are unprofitable or worth more to others. We believe we must drive creative destruction faster than our competitors; otherwise it will drive us out of business.

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All organizations can do this by developing a vision based on understanding their capabilities, and being committed to rapidly improving their ability to create value for their customers. This requires a culture of creative destruction. Molex, for example, has products with a life span as short as two to three years. Disruptive innovation is a company’s lifeblood to which significant human and financial resources must be dedicated. Intel cofounder Gordon Moore correctly determined that the performance of semi-conductors would double about every eighteen months. This is creative destruction at its most terrifying extreme and it is responsible for the 90 percent failure rate of technology start-ups.

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By bringing together engineering, physical sciences, and life sciences, the Koch Institute is poised to make significant breakthroughs in overcoming the terrible blight of cancer. Whether the goal is to cure cancer, build a smaller and faster smartphone, or develop a more efficient and environmentally friendly way of making nylon, disruptive innovation requires creating, acquiring, sharing, and applying knowledge. The methods used to do so are what we at Koch call knowledge processes. They include mechanisms to inform us immediately about developments everywhere in the world, and measures that give us feedback on how to improve our vision and mark our progress based on the best information and discoveries.

Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything by Peter Morville

A Pattern Language, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, augmented reality, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Black Swan, business process, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Computer Lib, disinformation, disruptive innovation, folksonomy, holacracy, index card, information retrieval, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kanban, Lean Startup, Lyft, messenger bag, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, Nelson Mandela, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Project Xanadu, quantum entanglement, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single source of truth, source of truth, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Do we need any more evidence that a Lyft is not a taxi? Meanwhile, taxis aren’t standing still. They’re adopting e-hail apps that enable passengers to book regular taxis with their mobile device. In short, from lawsuits to competition, Uber has plenty of problems. This is to be expected. Disruptive innovation inevitably provokes a response. Or, in the words of John Gall, “the system always kicks back.” In Systemantics, a witty, irreverent book published in 1975, Gall uses the example of garbage collection to explain that when we create a system to accomplish a goal, a new entity comes into being: the system itself.

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These include questions of collective bargaining with the garbage collectors’ union, rates and hours, collection on very cold or rainy days, purchase and maintenance of garbage trucks, millage and bond issues, voter apathy, regulations regarding the separation of garbage from trash…if the collectors bargain for more restrictive definitions of garbage, refusing to pick up twigs, trash, old lamps, and even leaving behind properly wrapped garbage if it is not placed within a regulation can, so that taxpayers resort to clandestine dumping along the highway, this exemplifies the Principle of Le Chatelier: the system tends to oppose its own proper function.vii This is why we need disruptive innovation within our society. Systems that have grown unresponsive must be shaken up. But, like garbage, change is messy. Disruptors such as Uber provoke counterattacks, and they build new systems that create new problems. All of this change results in unintended consequences that are hard to predict or control.

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But it’s also an ugly status symbol, a driving distraction, and an environmental nightmare. Fitbit, Jawbone, and Pebble are fascinating fitness tracking devices, but do we even know whether they’re making us more healthy or less? I’m not sure how to manage this trickster, but I do know we must shift from self-justification to self-awareness to move ahead. The secular myth of disruptive innovation isn’t new, but it is effective. We’re so busy searching for dinosaurs, we forget to look where we’re going. In 2004 when Bruce Sterling first spoke of spime – speculative objects precisely located in space and time – the vision he painted was bright green. Transfigured from passive consumers into heroic wranglers, we would mash products, sensors, RFID, and GPS into sustainable spime to reduce, reuse, and recycle like never before.

Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models by Gabriel Weinberg, Lauren McCann

Abraham Maslow, Abraham Wald, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, anti-pattern, Anton Chekhov, Apollo 13, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Broken windows theory, business process, butterfly effect, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, David Attenborough, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, fake news, fear of failure, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Goodhart's law, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, housing crisis, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, incognito mode, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, lateral thinking, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, LuLaRoe, Lyft, mail merge, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, nocebo, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, Potemkin village, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, premature optimization, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, publication bias, recommendation engine, remote working, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, school choice, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Shai Danziger, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Streisand effect, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systems thinking, The future is already here, The last Blockbuster video rental store is in Bend, Oregon, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uber lyft, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, warehouse robotics, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, When a measure becomes a target, wikimedia commons

Smartphone, 2002-2016 In Clayton Christensen’s seminal work The Innovator’s Dilemma, he lays out the framework for how such disruptive innovations ripple through industries, ushering new industry entrants into power while leaving dead incumbents in their wake. The incumbent’s dilemma is whether to embrace the disruptive technology, usually at the great cost of the existing business. That’s what Intel did but Kodak didn’t do. If Kodak had more readily embraced digital camera technology, it would have directly cannibalized its outsized profits in analog film technology. Similarly, many companies are right now facing difficult decisions about whether to embrace new disruptive innovations like artificial intelligence, solar power, streaming video, driverless vehicles, and electric cars.

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If you see disruption on the horizon in your field, you ought to prepare to respond sooner rather than later. Maybe that means investing in a new set of skills; maybe it means switching responsibilities; maybe it means pivoting to another field altogether. Unfortunately, truly embracing a disruptive innovation usually means major upheaval to the company or person itself: major losses of revenue in the short term, retraining from the ground up—a major pivot. There have been many instances where pivots have been advisable at the height of market dominance or earning potential. Unfortunately, market dominance can correspond with complacency.

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If you can’t find any bright spots in what you’re doing after some time, critically evaluate your position and consider a pivot. Build a moat around yourself and your organization to create sustainable competitive advantage. Don’t get complacent; remember only the paranoid survive, and keep on the lookout for disruptive innovations, particularly those with a high probability of crossing the chasm. Conclusion AS WE SAID IN THE INTRODUCTION, this is the book we wish someone had given us when we were starting out in our careers. That’s because mental models unlock the ability to think at higher levels. We hope that you’ve enjoyed reading about them, and that our book has helped you in your super thinking journey.

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital twin, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, fake news, food miles, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, gigafactory, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hive mind, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, loss aversion, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Lou Jepsen, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, mobile money, multiplanetary species, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban planning, Vision Fund, VTOL, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

In other words, these waves are starting to overlap, stacking atop one another, producing tsunami-sized behemoths that threaten to wash away most everything in their path. When a new innovation creates a new market and washes away an existing one, we use the term “disruptive innovation” to describe it. When silicon chips replaced vacuum tubes at the beginning of the digital age, this was a disruptive innovation. Yet, as exponential technologies converge, their potential for disruption increases in scale. Solitary exponentials disrupt products, services, and markets—like when Netflix ate Blockbuster for lunch—while convergent exponentials wash away products, services, and markets, as well as the structures that support them.

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., we have the honor of being home to ten of the world’s twenty-five most congested cities, costing us approximately $300 billion in lost income and productivity. Uber’s mission is to solve urban mobility.… Our goal is to introduce an entirely new form of transportation to the world, namely urban aviation, or what I prefer to call ‘aerial ridesharing.’ ” Aerial ridesharing might sound like sci-fi cliché, but Holden had a solid track record of disruptive innovation. In the late 1990s, he followed Jeff Bezos from New York to Seattle to become one of the earliest employees at Amazon. There, he was put in charge of implementing the then zany idea of free two-day shipping for a flat annual membership fee. It was an innovation that many thought would bankrupt the company.

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Converging Technology Moore’s Law: See: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/silicon-innovations/moores-law-technology.html. as a human brain: Ray Kurzweil, How to Create a Mind (Viking, 2012), pp. 179–198. “Law of Accelerating Returns”: Ray Kurzweil, “The Law of Accelerating Returns,” March 7, 2001. See: https://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns. we use the term “disruptive innovation”: Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma (HarperBusiness, 2000), pp. 15–19. Enter distributed electric propulsion, or DEP for short: Mark Moore, “Distributed Electric Propulsion Aircraft,” Nasa Langley Research Center. See: https://aero.larc.nasa.gov/files/2012/11/Distributed-Electric-Propulsion-Aircraft.pdf.

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy by Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, back-to-the-land, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, degrowth, disruptive innovation, do-ocracy, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, Fairphone, Food sovereignty, four colour theorem, future of work, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, holacracy, hydraulic fracturing, initial coin offering, intentional community, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Money creation, multi-sided market, Murray Bookchin, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-work, precariat, premature optimization, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart contracts, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TED Talk, transaction costs, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, undersea cable, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

There, Jimmy Boggs saw disruption decades ago, when a brew of robots, racism, and imports from Asia shut down the city’s factories, and when what remained of the auto industry fled to the whiter suburbs—consigning that capital of black America into decline and collapse. The jargon of disruption derives from a more precise academic concept. Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen began honing what he came to call “disruptive innovation” in the mid-1990s and early 2000s, referring to how a simple development, often from an oblique end of a market, can refashion the rules of the market in which it operates.5 In this way, the cheaper, less-mighty cars from Japan took on Detroit’s Cadillacs. It’s how Kodak invented the first digital camera in the 1970s but, by clinging to film, collapsed into bankruptcy by the hand of its own invention.

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Globalized markets let capital flow freely but stop the desperate migrants at the borders. The liberal-democratic consensus that some expected to spread everywhere has buckled as voters around the world elect autocrats. We’ve also been living through a disruption of networks. For Silicon Valley, the internet has created the favorite case in point of disruptive innovation. It wasn’t walking, talking, sci-fi robots that took the place of travel agents or Borders Books, it was apps—new points of connection that replaced incumbent intermediaries. These connections replace physical assets and “human resources” with creative arrangements of users and their data.

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Christensen, “Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave,” Harvard Business Review (January–February 1995); Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth (Harvard Business Press, 2003). Between the former and the latter, he adjusted the term from “disruptive technology” to “disruptive innovation.” 6. James Manyika et al., Jobs Lost, Jobs Gained: Workforce Transitions in a Time of Automation (McKinsey Global Institute, 2017). 7. See Thomas I. Palley, Financialization: The Economics of Finance Capital Domination (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 8. Johnston Birchall, Resilience in a Downturn: The Power of Financial Cooperatives (International Labour Organization, 2013); Clifford Rosenthal, Credit Unions, Community Development Finance, and the Great Recession (Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, 2012). 9.

The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Their Consequences by Rob Kitchin

Bayesian statistics, business intelligence, business process, cellular automata, Celtic Tiger, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, congestion charging, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, discrete time, disruptive innovation, George Gilder, Google Earth, hype cycle, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, longitudinal study, machine readable, Masdar, means of production, Nate Silver, natural language processing, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, platform as a service, recommendation engine, RFID, semantic web, sentiment analysis, SimCity, slashdot, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart grid, smart meter, software as a service, statistical model, supply-chain management, technological solutionism, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, transaction costs

Given their relative paucity, good-quality data were a valuable commodity, either jealously guarded or expensively traded. Recently, this state of affairs has started to change quite radically. Data have lost none of their value, but in other respects their production and nature is being transformed through a set of what Christensen (1997) terms disruptive innovations that challenge the status quo as to how data are produced, managed, analysed, stored and utilised. Rather than being scarce and limited in access, the production of data is increasingly becoming a deluge; a wide, deep torrent of timely, varied, resolute and relational data that are relatively low in cost and, outside of business, increasingly open and accessible.

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Given the drive to digitise and scale traditional small data into digital infrastructures that are voluminous and varied (such as national archives, censuses and collections of cultural and social heritage; see Chapter 2) it is velocity and these additional characteristics that set big data apart and make them a disruptive innovation (Christensen’s 1997) one that radically changes the nature of data and what can be done with them (see Table 2.1). For example, a national household survey has large volume, strong resolution and relationality, but lacks velocity (once a year), variety (usually c.30 structured questions), exhaustivity (a sample of perhaps one in twenty households), and flexibility (the fields are fixed, typically across surveys, to enable time-seried analysis).

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Conclusion There is little doubt that the data revolution offers the possibility to reframe the epistemology of science, social science and humanities, and such a reframing is already actively taking place. Big data and the scaling of small data into data infrastructures enable the implementation of new approaches to data generation and analyses that make it possible to ask and answer questions in new ways. This has led some to make bold claims that the data revolution is a disruptive innovation that is ushering in a paradigm shift in how research is conducted. It is certainly the case that the shift from a data desert to a data deluge and new data analytics will transform research praxis. However, care needs to be taken in making assertions about the reframing of research and about the best path forward in such a reframing.

The End of Nice: How to Be Human in a World Run by Robots (Kindle Single) by Richard Newton

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Black Swan, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Clayton Christensen, crowdsourcing, deliberate practice, digital divide, disruptive innovation, fail fast, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, future of work, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, lolcat, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Paul Erdős, Paul Graham, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social intelligence, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Tyler Cowen, Y Combinator

The program is run by a company called TechStars which is one of the three big names in “start-up accelerators” alongside Y-Combinator and 500 Start-Ups. Accelerators are entrepreneurial bootcamps which provide embryonic companies with a workspace, business expertise and access to money, press, partners, know-how and a giant corps d’esprit. After a typical three-month program, the start-up companies are released into the commercial world to disrupt, innovate and clean up! Or fail. In fact the name of the game is fail fast. It’s the antithesis of big business thinking. In the world of tech start-ups the approach is to test your best business idea as fast as possible to see how it fails in order to better know what might work, then fix it, improve it, then test again.

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There’s a similarity here with the limitations of traditional business school thinking that Clayton Christensen has warned about in his book The Innovator’s Dilemma. If we rely solely on past data to inform our future direction, then we will be like the giant enterprises who didn’t realise that at the fringes of their world disruptive innovators were planning to revolutionise and consume their markets. As Larry Page said: “Lots of companies don’t succeed over time. What do they fundamentally do wrong? They usually miss the future.” As the unknown is deliberately managed away from us, then we become more predictable, less alert and thus more vulnerable to surprises.

Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy by Alexandrea J. Ravenelle

active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, barriers to entry, basic income, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, East Village, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, job automation, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), low skilled workers, Lyft, minimum wage unemployment, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, passive income, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, precariat, rent control, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telemarketer, the payments system, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, very high income, white flight, working poor, Zipcar

In this view—and it is not insignificant—the idea of hacking comes from a position of arrogance.”99 Likewise, Silicon Valley’s favorite phrase, “let’s break shit,” is part of Schumpeter’s “creative destruction,” a theory of economic progress in which new business rises like a phoenix from the ashes of old business.100 Creative destruction has also been described as an early version of Clayton Christensen’s hypothesis of “disruptive innovation,” in which economies flourish when start-ups replace established firms.101 And of course, to disrupt the status quo of established industries is part of the goal of the sharing economy. When the term sharing economy first entered the public lexicon, the sharing economy itself looked like a step forward.

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Under the guise of trust, workers undergo background checks, online reviews, and continual monitoring in an online panopticon of worker evaluation, even as they find themselves working for unknown individuals, outside standard workplace protections, and exposed to considerable risks. Another way to think of Christensen’s “disruptive innovation” is “the selling of a cheaper, poorer-quality product that . . . eventually takes over and devours an entire industry.”105 As sharing economy services have grown and proliferated, they’ve successfully subverted generations of financial gains and workplace protections. Workers have been returned to an early industrial age in which protections were nonexistent, their risks were great, and they were under the control of corporations and the elite.

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Workers have been returned to an early industrial age in which protections were nonexistent, their risks were great, and they were under the control of corporations and the elite. As Jill Lepore puts it, innovation is “the idea of progress stripped of the aspirations of the Enlightenment, scrubbed clean of the horrors of the twentieth century, and relieved of its critics. Disruptive innovation goes further, holding out the hope of salvation against the very damnation it describes: disrupt, and you will be saved.”106 The sharing economy offers workers a way to “save themselves” through extra work, but the growth of the sharing economy may only continue to subvert workers’ rights and protections.

Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks

autonomous vehicles, basic income, Black Lives Matter, business process, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, data science, deindustrialization, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, experimental subject, fake news, gentrification, housing crisis, Housing First, IBM and the Holocaust, income inequality, job automation, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, payday loans, performance metric, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sparse data, statistical model, strikebreaker, underbanked, universal basic income, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, zero-sum game

In my most pessimistic moments, I fear that we are winning the fight against mass incarceration at just the historical moment when the digital poorhouse makes the physical institution of the prison less necessary. Corporations already anticipate the immense cost savings of building a digital prison state without walls. A 2012 Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu report titled Public Sector, Disrupted, for example, sees “transforming criminal justice with electronic monitoring” as an “opportunity for disruptive innovation” in government services. A graphic brings their point home. On the left side is a stick figure behind prison bars. In the middle, there is an equal sign. On the right, there are five and a half stick figures wearing electronic ankle bracelets. The violence of the digital poorhouse is less direct than police brutality, its operation harder to see.

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., Doris R. Entwisle, and Linda Steffel Olson. The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood. American Sociological Association, Rose Series in Sociology. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2014. Deloitte Touche. Public Sector, Disrupted: How Disruptive Innovation Can Help Government Achieve More for Less. 2012. https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/global/Documents/Public-Sector/dttl-ps-publicsectordisrupted-08082013.pdf. [Accessed Aug. 1, 2017.] Edin, Kathryn J., and H. Luke Shaefer. $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015.

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See automated decision making; predictive risk models digital poorhouse and class and criminalization and discrimination dismantling the and diversion from public resources effects of and equity eternality of and “fear of falling” as hard to understand intractability of National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) novel aspects of origins of and politics and prediction of future behavior scalability of and self-interest and values discretion of caseworkers in decision-making discrimination and child welfare and cultural denial and digital poorhouse and public assistance rational and reverse redlining and welfare reform disinvestment in neighborhoods in social service programs disproportionality in child welfare decisions disruptive innovation Dogon, General Dreyer, David driverless cars drug and alcohol abuse Drug and Alcohol Services drug and alcohol treatment drug testing Du Bois, W.E.B. due process Dunham, Calvin B. EBT. See electronic benefits transfer economic depression of 1819 of 1873 economic violence Edin, Kathryn J.

The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be by Moises Naim

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deskilling, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, intangible asset, intermodal, invisible hand, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megacity, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, open borders, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in.”42 The shifts in power that we see all around us—which include and transcend the ascent and demise of business enterprises—are certainly consistent with Schumpeter’s expectations. They are also in line with the insights of Clayton Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor who coined the term disruptive innovation, meaning a change—in technology, service, or product—that creates a new market by relying on a completely new approach. The effects of a disruptive innovation eventually spill over to other related or similar markets and undermine them. The iPad is a good example. Using your cellphone to pay for groceries or to send money to your daughter in another continent are two other good examples.

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Electoral campaigns now rely on more sophisticated methods of persuasion—and, of course, more people than ever are governed by a leader they have elected and not by a dictator. While welcome, these changes pale in comparison with the extraordinary transformations in communications, medicine, business, and war. In short, disruptive innovation has not arrived in politics, government, and political participation. But it will. We are on the verge of a revolutionary wave of positive political and institutional innovations. As this book has shown, power is changing in so many arenas that it will be impossible to avoid important transformations in the way humanity organizes itself to make the decisions it needs to survive and progress.

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.), 251 waves of democratization, 83, 248 Democratic Party, 76, 95, 203 Demographics, 4, 54, 66, 69, 74 Denmark, 92, 149, 151 DeParle, Jason, 59 Depression period, 45, 55, 136 Derivatives, 160, 184 Desai, Raj, 210, 211 Deutsche Börse, 188 Developing countries, 7, 10, 55, 56, 57, 61, 63, 129, 146, 167, 172, 183, 185, 187, 254 Dhar, Sujoy, 70 Diamond, Larry, 85, 102–103 Diamond industry, 165 Dictators, 1, 5, 29, 53, 75, 78, 82, 83, 220, 247. See also Authoritarianism Dimon, Jamie, 161–162 di Pietro, Antonio, 98, 99 Diplomacy, 153–155 economic, 144–147, 149 Direct Edge, 188 Disease, 10, 73, 140, 210, 226 Disney, 179, 212 Disruptive Innovation, 71, 243 District of Columbia, 88 Divorce, 65, 66 DIY Drones group, 119 Dobbs, Richard, 61 Dolan, Kerry A., 181 Domhoff, G. William, 48 Dominica, 155 Doris Duke Foundation, 210 Dorset, 181 DoubleClick, 174–175 Dow Jones, 174, 212 Drones, 112, 118–119, 121 Drugs, 73, 110, 122, 125–126, 222 Dupont, 165 Durkheim, Émile, 231 East Timor, 81 Economic/financial crises, 15, 18, 57, 68, 91, 102, 132, 160, 164, 176, 183, 184, 218, 224, 228, 238.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, circular economy, clean water, collaborative consumption, commoditize, conceptual framework, continuous integration, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, digital divide, digital twin, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, future of work, global value chain, Google Glasses, hype cycle, income inequality, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, life extension, Lyft, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, Narrative Science, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, nuclear taboo, OpenAI, personalized medicine, precariat, precision agriculture, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, reshoring, RFID, rising living standards, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social contagion, software as a service, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y Combinator, Zipcar

World Economic Forum Agenda, Aug 9 https://agenda.weforum.org/2015/08/5-brain-technologies-future/ Fernandez A (2015). 10 neurotechnologies about to transform brain enhancement and brain health. SharpBrains, USA, Nov 10 http://sharpbrains.com/blog/2015/11/10/10-neurotechnologies-about-to-transform-brain-enhancement-and-brain-health/ Notes 1 The terms “disruption” and “disruptive innovation” have been much discussed in business and management strategy circles, most recently in Clayton M. Christensen, Michael E. Raynor, and Rory McDonald, What is Disruptive Innovation?, Harvard Business Review, December 2015. While respecting the concerns of Professor Christensen and his colleagues about definitions, I have employed the broader meanings in this book. 2 Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, W.W.

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, bank run, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Build a better mousetrap, California gold rush, cashless society, colonial rule, computer age, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, deep learning, digital nomad, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Extropian, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fake news, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, hacker house, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, intentional community, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, Parker Conrad, passive income, patent troll, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-work, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, RFID, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social software, software as a service, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, technoutopianism, telepresence, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Y Combinator, Zenefits

Today more people than ever are becoming billionaires—two thousand and counting have made the great leap upward, according to the “global wealth team” at Forbes. Virtually no aspect of the geopolitical arena, the natural environment, or the human experience escapes their influence. And America’s hottest billionaire factory happens to be located in the most hyped yet least understood swath of suburban sprawl in the world: Silicon Valley. Seat of disruptive innovation and home to the heroes of high tech, the Valley calls out like an alluring siren to ambitious, skilled, and forward-thinking people from all over. Its singular approach to wealth creation—let’s call it “the Silicon Valley way”—was endorsed by former president Barack Obama himself. In a State of the Union address, he pledged to support “every risk-taker and entrepreneur who aspires to become the next Steve Jobs.”

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Unfortunately, subsequent discussions made clear that I had been haggling over the price of Magdalena for one night, not the price of her spare room for one month. * * * Lacking the financial stability required to secure a lease, much less a mortgage, my best hope upon leaving Hacker Condo was to find another “hacker house.” These were the products of disruptive innovation in urban real estate. The city was once riddled with small apartments and single-family homes that sheltered trifling handfuls of obsolete laborers and their unproductive children, often for decades at a stretch. But the tech boom let such so-called family homes reach their full potential as investment properties.

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A “disruptive” company had the potential to take over an entire industry, as medieval scriptoria were disrupted by movable type, the infantry charge by the machine gun, knowledge by Google, and so on. The spurious notion that there was some discernible Law of Business Administration to be found within such miscellaneous instances of human behavioral change dated to 1997, when a Harvard Business School professor published his theory of “disruptive innovation.” Another Harvardite, Mark Zuckerberg, enshrined disruption as the operating principle of Facebook, commanding employees to “move fast and break things.” Later techie manifestos boiled the scholarly pretense down to its vulgar essence: “Break shit.” I needed to look like someone who was ready to break shit.

Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work by Steven Kotler, Jamie Wheal

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Future Shock, Hacker News, high batting average, hive mind, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, hype cycle, Hyperloop, impulse control, independent contractor, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Mason jar, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microdosing, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, science of happiness, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, TED Talk, time dilation, Tony Hsieh, urban planning, Virgin Galactic

At first, when breakthroughs happen, only those people willing to tolerate the risk and uncertainty of a novel technology get on board, a trade they’ll make for the benefits of being “early adopters.” Then there’s a gap, what Moore called “the chasm,” that any idea has to cross to attract a growing audience. It’s attracting that “early majority” on the far side of the chasm that he feels is the true mark of disruptive innovation. Up until now, we’ve focused primarily on the pioneers and early adopters—those most visibly driving the evolution of the four forces. Here we want to take a moment to catalog signs of broader applications, focusing on the places where the chasm has been crossed and a critical early majority are starting to incorporate state-changing tools and techniques into their everyday lives.

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This ability to continually update and advance our own understanding, ahead of anyone else’s attempts to constrain or repurpose them may be the key to breaking the stalemate. Wu agrees. “The Cycle is powered by disruptive innovations49 that . . . bankrupt the dominant powers, and change the world. Such innovations are exceedingly rare, but they are what make the Cycle go.” An open-source approach to non-ordinary states makes Wu’s “disruptive innovations” a little less rare, and the ability to share and distribute them less susceptible to co-optation. And while the four forces don’t guarantee a bloodless revolution, they do ensure that more people get to decide for themselves. And that’s the ultimate paradox of these states: all that liberation comes with an unavoidable dose of responsibility.

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“all the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects”: Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (London: Chatto & Windus, 1932), p. 54. 47. “In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting”: Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (New York: Penguin, 2005), p. viii. 48. all power that derives from the control of information: Tim Wu, The Master Switch (New York: Knopf, 2010), p. 310. 49. The Cycle is powered by disruptive innovations: Ibid., p. 20. Chapter Ten: Hedonic Engineering 1. Sasha Shulgin used to say:” Dirty Pictures. 2. First identified back in the 1930s, Jerusalem Syndrome: Yair Bar-El et al., “Jerusalem Syndrome,” British Journal of Psychiatry 176 (2000): 86–90. 3. It’s why Burning Man advises people: This essay is one the more frequently reposted and entertaining articles on “decompression” or coming back to regular life after the event, by “The Colonel” of Arctic Monkey Camp: “Do Not Divorce Your Parakeet Yet,” New York Burners Guide, original date and publishing location unknown.

Lessons from the Titans: What Companies in the New Economy Can Learn from the Great Industrial Giants to Drive Sustainable Success by Scott Davis, Carter Copeland, Rob Wertheimer

3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, airport security, asset light, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Boeing 747, business cycle, business process, clean water, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, data science, disruptive innovation, Elisha Otis, Elon Musk, factory automation, fail fast, financial engineering, Ford Model T, global pandemic, hydraulic fracturing, Internet of things, iterative process, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, low cost airline, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, megacity, Michael Milken, Network effects, new economy, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, random walk, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skunkworks, software is eating the world, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, TED Talk, Toyota Production System, Uber for X, value engineering, warehouse automation, WeWork, winner-take-all economy

Venture capital (VC) funding for industrial markets, under a billion dollars 10 years ago, exceeded $40 billion in 2018. Total R&D spent by all public industrial companies is now around $90 billion, so in a few short years VC investment has reached close to half that level. (See Figure 10.7.) Most of this influx of funding aims at disruptive innovations, while most standard R&D is incremental. Accordingly, the tech world is now outspending the industrial world on real disruption by a wide margin and with greater efficiency. Figure 10.7: VC funding has become much more important to the future of industrials. Source: Pitchbook That sort of shift creates the sense of urgency that Loree was experiencing in 2014 and 2015.

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That option is a big deal on construction jobsites, as removing extension cords or noisy air compressors has clear benefits for productivity, safety, and quality of the work environment. Fueled by this initial success, which saw FlexVolt sales rising 10 times as fast as prior innovations, the company formalized disruptive innovation as part of its update and expansion of SFS. It set up several teams outside its core offices, near universities and other innovation hubs. One such breakthrough innovation center developed deep relationships with a German automaker. The automaker had an engineering challenge that wasn’t directly related to SBD’s product or expertise, but the teams knew each other, and the automaker knew of the new focus on outside-the-box thinking.

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There is a huge opportunity to go electric in this space, at an even faster pace than with cars. The two-stroke engines of many lawn care products are inherently dirty, emitting pollution far out of proportion to their fuel use, because emissions equipment is too expensive on small engines. In 10 years, much of the lawn and garden tool products may be electric. Disruptive innovation teams are already working on the opportunity. POSTMORTEM Stanley Black & Decker took the flywheel of margin improvement and capital redeployment and added in a technology layer. The acquisition of the Craftsman brand exemplifies the synergistic opportunities that have been unlocked with SBD’s transformation.

How Will You Measure Your Life? by Christensen, Clayton M., Dillon, Karen, Allworth, James

air freight, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Clayton Christensen, disruptive innovation, hiring and firing, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, job satisfaction, late fees, Mahatma Gandhi, Nick Leeson, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, working poor, young professional

But I can offer you tools that I’ll call theories in this book, which will help you make good choices, appropriate to the circumstances of your life. I learned about the power of this approach in 1997, before I published my first book, The Innovator’s Dilemma I got a call from Andy Grove, then the chairman of Intel. He had heard of one of my early academic papers about disruptive innovation, and asked me to come to Santa Clara to explain my research and tell him and his top team what it implied for Intel. A young professor, I excitedly flew to Silicon Valley and showed up at the appointed time, only to have Andy say, “Look, stuff has happened. We have only ten minutes for you.

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Fast-paced careers, family responsibilities, and tangible rewards of success tend to swallow up time and perspective. They will just sail off from their time at school without a rudder and get buffeted in the very rough seas of life. In the long run, clarity about purpose will trump knowledge of activity-based costing, balanced scorecards, core competence, disruptive innovation, the four Ps, the five forces, and other key business theories we teach at Harvard. What’s true for them is true for you, too. If you take the time to figure out your purpose in life, I promise that you will look back on it as the most important thing you will have ever learned. I HAVE WRITTEN this book with my wonderful and capable coauthors to help you to be successful and happy in your career.

The End of Indexing: Six Structural Mega-Trends That Threaten Passive Investing by Niels Jensen

Alan Greenspan, Basel III, Bear Stearns, declining real wages, deglobalization, disruptive innovation, diversification, Donald Trump, driverless car, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, fixed income, full employment, Greenspan put, income per capita, index fund, industrial robot, inflation targeting, job automation, John Nash: game theory, liquidity trap, low interest rates, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, passive investing, Phillips curve, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, rising living standards, risk free rate, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, South China Sea, total factor productivity, working-age population, zero-sum game

An early example of disruption would be digital camera innovators disrupting Eastman Kodak’s traditional camera business. That said, disrupters are not always successful. It is a misconception that entrants are disruptive by virtue of their success. Success is not built into the definition of disruption. Looking ahead, disruption can only intensify, and automation is only a subset of disruptive innovations coming our way. Yes, driverless cars are not that many years away, and robots will soon be able to do what humans have done for centuries; however, there is much more to disruption than advanced robotics. For example, think Amazon and think about the extensive damage it has done to retail businesses all over the world.

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Gollin, Douglas (2002) Getting Income Shares Right, Journal of Political Economy. Vol.110, No.2 pp.458–474. Haldane, Andrew (2015) Drag and Drop, speech given by A. Haldane, Chief Economist of Bank of England at the BizClub in Rutland, March 2015. Harvard Business Review (2015) What Is Disruptive Innovation? Clayton M. Christensen, Michael E. Raynor and Rory McDonald. Haver Analytics, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Morgan Stanley Wealth Management Investment Resources (2017) Demographic Destiny: Are Millennials Spending Differently Than Baby Boomers? ©2017 Morgan Stanley Smith Barney LLC. IMF (2016) Regional Economic Outlook, Middle East and Central Asia Department.

Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside by Xiaowei Wang

4chan, AI winter, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, cloud computing, Community Supported Agriculture, computer vision, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, drop ship, emotional labour, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, hype cycle, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, job automation, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer lending, precision agriculture, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, SoftBank, software is eating the world, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological solutionism, the long tail, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, vertical integration, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator, zoonotic diseases

But in the 2000s, R&D shifted, spilling out into the private realm—highlighted by the success of early internet startups with private investment in China, such as Sohu and Baidu. At the same time, the economic success of Town and Village Enterprises showed how new institutional structures could catalyze innovation. And for many companies in China at the time, innovation wasn’t about creating entirely new products—“disruptive innovation”—but also about the ways existing processes could be optimized and streamlined, a form of “continuous innovation.” By the 2000s, foreign companies had entered China. These companies still dominate the majority of certain sectors in China, despite purportedly extensive intellectual property theft.

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“I have American apps that I open once a month and eventually delete. But there are Chinese apps that I open multiple times a day. You’re so dependent on apps for daily life. There’s a saying about ‘China speed’—that tech in China is moving so fast that America can barely keep up.” For this analyst, these apps, their convenience, indicate that disruptive innovation is happening in China. A friend of mine, a VC who spends ample time traveling between the United States and China, remarks that the Silicon Valley hubris is real. He tells me that most of the time, you hear people say they’re starting the new Silicon Valley of somewhere, and it never happens, it fails.

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI by Frank Pasquale

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, deskilling, digital divide, digital twin, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, finite state, Flash crash, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hiring and firing, holacracy, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, late capitalism, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, megaproject, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, obamacare, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open immigration, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, plutocrats, post-truth, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart cities, smart contracts, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Future of Employment, The Turner Diaries, Therac-25, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, wage slave, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zero day

The bargain at the core of professionalism is to empower workers to have some say in the organization of production, while imposing duties upon them to advance the common good.10 By advancing research, whether in divisions of universities or in their own offices, professionals cultivate distributed expertise, alleviating classic tensions between technocracy and popular rule. We should not be dismantling or disabling professions, as all too many advocates of disruptive innovation aspire to do. Rather, humane automation will require the strengthening of existing communities of expertise and the creation of new ones. A good definition of professions is capacious, and it should include many unionized workers, particularly when they protect those they serve from unwise or dangerous technologies.

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Other social science and humanities scholars have vital insights, advancing deep and nuanced accounts of the role of money in society, among many other dimensions of commerce. A renewed political economy of automation must be built upon these plural foundations, unafraid of enacting the substantive value judgments encoded in the new laws of robotics. FROM MORE AI TO BETTER AI Theorists of disruptive innovation have proposed to “cure” the cost disease by standardizing, automating, and even robotizing service-intensive sectors like health care, finance, and education. From massive open online courses to robotic companions for the elderly, these innovations aim to displace workers (or at least work) with mechanical imitations of human labor.

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Christensen, Clayton Christensen, Curtis W. Johnson, and Michael B. Horn, Disrupting Class (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008) and Clayton M. Christensen, Jerome Grossman, and Jason Hwang, The Innovator’s Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009), which examines disruptive innovations in health care. 79. Kenneth Scheve and David Stasavage, Taxing the Rich: A History of Fiscal Fairness in the United States and Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. 80. Alondra Nelson, “Society after Pandemic,” Items: Insights from the Social Sciences, April 23, 2020, at https://items.ssrc.org/covid-19-and-the-social-sciences/society-after-pandemic/.

System Error by Rob Reich

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deplatforming, digital rights, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Lean Startup, linear programming, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, premature optimization, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trolley problem, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, union organizing, universal basic income, washing machines reduced drudgery, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, When a measure becomes a target, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, you are the product

Part I Decoding the Technologists In an age of advanced technology, inefficiency is the sin against the Holy Ghost. —Aldous Huxley, foreword to Brave New World, 1946 Chapter 1 The Imperfections of the Optimization Mindset Contrary to current popular opinion, for most of its storied existence the United States Postal Service has been a hub of disruptive innovation. In 1792, Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, ushered the Postal Service Act into law, giving the federal government control over various regional postal routes and declaring that the content of mail was private, even if delivered by a public carrier. It also provided for a novel cost structure: rather than charging on the basis of weight, the postal service would charge one rate for letters and another much less expensive rate for newspapers.

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., Moneyball-style tactics using big-data analytics to drive decisions) and even to our personal lives (e.g., online dating apps and fitness trackers). It’s no coincidence that the industry and skill set most ascendant over the same time period has been computer science. In the digital age, the disruptive innovators tend to be the efficiency-obsessed tribe of people called coders, or software engineers. They are the ones who invent and bring to market the host of new technologies that are driving efficiency gains across so many aspects of life. Should We Optimize Everything? Efficiency is not always the good thing it seems to be.

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Computer hardware, processing power, big data, algorithms, artificial intelligence (AI), and network power are the most important currencies of our age. The quants and financial engineers have invaded the big banks, and it is the venture capitalists of Palo Alto, not fund managers on Wall Street, who finance disruptive innovation. Yet the worldview of the technologist is sometimes poorly understood by those outside the tech industry. Unlike economists in the twentieth century, engineers are generally not entering politics as advisers and decision makers. They tend instead to bypass politics altogether. In all the discussion of the political and societal problems brought about by new technology, what has been missing is an understanding of the small and anomalous group of human beings who create that technology and are constantly tweaking it, tuning it, optimizing it in response to their notions of how it ought to be better.

Built for Growth: How Builder Personality Shapes Your Business, Your Team, and Your Ability to Win by Chris Kuenne, John Danner

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, asset light, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, Bob Noyce, business climate, business logic, call centre, cloud computing, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gordon Gekko, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, pattern recognition, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, sugar pill, super pumped, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TED Talk, work culture , zero-sum game

Captains are arguably the most fully developed leaders in terms of direct, honest, and consistent communication among the individuals and teams they manage. But their more consensus-based approach can lead to a form of incrementalism that may miss the necessity or opportunity for more dramatic, disruptive innovation in their markets. Which Builder Personality Is Most Similar to Yours? While the descriptions you read on the preceding pages are the simplest way to identify which Builder Personality Type you are most like, here we will show you a bit more about how our typing process works. The instrument appearing on the next page represents a simplified version of our Builder Personality Discovery™ (BPD) quiz.

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At the same time, your predilection to allow context and consensus to frame the solution may come at the expense of genuine commercial breakthroughs. Your approach can result in more incremental solutions to more immediate problems. It is less likely to lead to a Steve Jobs–like or Henry Ford–caliber truly disruptive innovation. Other Builder Personality Types probably have a better shot at those kinds of leaps. The Team Dynamic: Galvanizing Individual Talent for Collaborative Impact If you’re a Captain, you are as much a team assembler as you are a catalyst. You are intent on creating a company culture around values and mutual accountability.

Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Thomas Ramge

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Apollo 11, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, banking crisis, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, gig economy, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land reform, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, low cost airline, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, Parag Khanna, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, random walk, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, universal basic income, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

The banks’ bet is: if you get disrupted, you should at least own some of the players that take away your business. In 2015 alone, these fintechs attracted investments exceeding $19 billion worldwide. Some pundits have described the frantic activity as a fintech bubble. Although a number of fintechs focus on payment solutions, many of them focus squarely on offering disruptive innovation in two areas we’ll examine briefly: lending and investment planning. For decades, money lending has progressed from a matter of personal trust—think of a community bank manager deciding whether somebody gets a mortgage or not—to a decision driven by a single statistic: an individual’s credit score.

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But more important than taking sides in this debate is understanding the significance of the UBI movement as well as its limitations. Perhaps it doesn’t come as a surprise that high-tech innovators are looking for creative ways to respond to the social challenges posed by data-driven markets and the reconfiguration of our economy. Ingrained thinking is something not even Silicon Valley can escape: if you believe in disruptive innovation, it may become your standard response to any problem. But it may not be all that innovative an idea. If data enables us to go beyond money, why does the social innovation designed to solve the problems caused by data-driven markets emphasize money? Why are we reintroducing, through a UBI, a simple, fixed monetary solution in situations that quite obviously require an assessment of needs beyond money?

Shadow Work: The Unpaid, Unseen Jobs That Fill Your Day by Craig Lambert

airline deregulation, Asperger Syndrome, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, big-box store, business cycle, carbon footprint, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data science, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, emotional labour, fake it until you make it, financial independence, Galaxy Zoo, ghettoisation, gig economy, global village, helicopter parent, IKEA effect, industrial robot, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Mark Zuckerberg, new economy, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, recommendation engine, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, statistical model, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, you are the product, zero-sum game, Zipcar

The product will probably not be as good as what a professional would produce, but it is good enough for many customers, and far less expensive. The shadow-working consumer simply customizes the template for her needs and goes ahead with it—planting the garden or going live with the new website. Such templates are examples of “disruptive innovation,” a term Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen coined in his landmark 1992 book The Innovator’s Dilemma. Disruptive innovation happens when a new company introduces a product that is cheaper, simpler, and/or faster than those on the market. Toyota and Honda, for example, disrupted Detroit’s Big Three automakers by bringing out cheaper, smaller, no-frills cars like the Corolla and Civic.

Democratizing innovation by Eric von Hippel

additive manufacturing, correlation coefficient, Debian, disruptive innovation, Free Software Foundation, hacker house, informal economy, information asymmetry, inventory management, iterative process, James Watt: steam engine, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, machine readable, meta-analysis, Network effects, placebo effect, principal–agent problem, Richard Stallman, software patent, systematic bias, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, tragedy of the anticommons, transaction costs, vertical integration, Vickrey auction

How do we square these findings with the arguments, put forth by Christensen (1997), by Slater and Narver (1998), and by others, that firms are likely to miss radical or disruptive innovations if they pay close attention to requests from their customers? Christensen (1997, p. 59, n. 21) writes: “The research of Eric von Hippel, frequently cited as evidence of the value of listening to customers, indicates that customers originate a large majority of new product ideas. . . . The [Christensen] value network framework would predict that the innovations toward which the customers in von Hippel’s study led their suppliers would have been sustaining innovations. We would expect disruptive innovations to have come from other sources.” Unfortunately, the above contains a basic misunderstanding of my research findings.

Shorter: Work Better, Smarter, and Less Here's How by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

8-hour work day, airport security, Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Brexit referendum, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, centre right, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, death from overwork, disruptive innovation, Erik Brynjolfsson, future of work, game design, gig economy, Henri Poincaré, IKEA effect, iterative process, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, Johannes Kepler, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, means of production, neurotypical, PalmPilot, performance metric, race to the bottom, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional, zero-sum game

The percentage of workers employed in temporary work, gig-economy jobs, or zero-hours contracts has grown dramatically in the US, with other advanced economies following. Executives learned they could boost profits by shredding workforces, tapping global manufacturing and transportation networks, or using “disruptive innovation” to drive established companies out of business. The rise of Silicon Valley in the 1980s brought with it a new model of work and success that glamorized long hours, made workaholics into heroes, and turned overwork into a badge of honor. As a result, we now live in a fast-moving, unstable world in which overwork is a source of riches for some and a necessity for survival for the rest.

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After ten years in advertising and “a lot of late nights, a lot of overnighters in some cases,” Michael Honey realized when he founded digital interactive agency Icelab that he “wanted to work a relaxed forty hours, rather than a frenetic fifty hours.” Interestingly, they don’t come from places like the University of Pennsylvania (where I studied) or Stanford University (where I taught)—the kinds of institutions that congratulate themselves on educating the world’s disruptive innovators and business visionaries. In Korea, where many corporate executives are drawn from elite universities like Seoul National and KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology), Bong-Jin Kim studied graphic design. Yusaku Maezawa, Zozo’s colorful founder and CEO, dropped out of Waseda University.

Tech Titans of China: How China's Tech Sector Is Challenging the World by Innovating Faster, Working Harder, and Going Global by Rebecca Fannin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, cloud computing, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, fake news, family office, fear of failure, fulfillment center, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, megacity, Menlo Park, money market fund, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, QR code, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, WeWork, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, young professional

—Jerry Haar and Ricardo Ernst, professors respectively at Florida International University and Georgetown, and co-authors of Innovation in Emerging Markets “Tech Titans of China gives us a very clear and concrete China innovation 101, and lays out how China tech giants are creating their own technology universe.” —Edith Yeung, Creator of China Internet Report, Partner at Proof of Capital and 500 Startups “If you care about the future of innovation, then this is an absolute must read book.” —Mike Grandinetti, Faculty Chairman: Rutgers “Leading Disruptive Innovation” Executive Program; Faculty Member: MIT Enterprise Forum Startup Founders Program; Global Professor: Entrepreneurship, Innovation & Marketing, Hult International Business School “Whatever the debate may be about Chinese government policies, no one should believe that China’s private companies aren’t innovative.

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Leapfrogging to Copied from China In less than two decades, China tech innovation has evolved and gone through three phases of development: from copy to China, to invented in China, and now today, the biggest trend to watch is copied from China, meaning US companies duplicate Chinese innovations. China’s first-generation internet entrepreneurs unabashedly created copies of successful American startups Yahoo!, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and eBay. Intellectual property protections were scant. Now Chinese technocrats are breaking boundaries with their own disruptive innovations, taking them overseas and getting copied by Westerners. Chinese internet companies are no longer dismissed as mere copycats of Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Amazon—as they were when my Silicon Dragon book first was published in 2008. Now, made-in-China business models built for a mobile-first generation are advanced and widely used.

The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine Is in Your Hands by Eric Topol

23andMe, 3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anne Wojcicki, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, Big Tech, bioinformatics, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, connected car, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, gamification, global village, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, job automation, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, lifelogging, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, microbiome, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, Snapchat, social graph, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traumatic brain injury, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, X Prize

DiSanzo, “Op/Ed: Hospital of the Future Will Be a Health Delivery Network,” US News & World Report, January 14, 2014, http://health.usnews.com/health-news/hospital-of-tomorrow/articles/2014/01/14/oped-hospital-of-the-future-will-be-a-health-delivery-network. 3. J. Comstock, “Revisiting How Christensen’s ‘Disruption Innovation’ in Healthcare Means Decentralization,” MobiHealthNews, March 26, 2014, http://mobihealthnews.com/31470/revisiting-how-christensens-disruption-innovation-in-healthcare-means-decentralization/. 4. E. Topol et al., “A Randomized Controlled Trial of Hospital Discharge Three Days After Myocardial Infarction in the Era of Reperfusion,” New England Journal of Medicine 318 (1988): 1083–1088. 5.

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Levingston, “Practice Fusion Wants to Be Free,” Bloomberg Businessweek, February 6, 2014, http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-02-06/practice-fusions-medical-records-technology-is-free-for-doctors. 66. D. Hernandez, “How Medical Tech Promises to Save Lives,” USA Today, June 14, 2014, http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/06/14/medical-technology-va-healthcare-emr/10369071/. Chapter 8 1. U. E. Reinhardt, “The Disruptive Innovation of Price Transparency in Health Care,” Journal of the American Medical Association 310, no. 18 (2013): 1927–1928. 2. T. Rosenberg, “The Cure for the $1,000 Toothbrush,” New York Times, August 13, 2013, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/13/the-cure-for-the-1000-toothbrush/. 3. S.

When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm by Walt Bogdanich, Michael Forsythe

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alistair Cooke, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, asset light, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, Bear Stearns, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Citizen Lab, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, data science, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, illegal immigration, income inequality, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, job satisfaction, job-hopping, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, load shedding, Mark Zuckerberg, megaproject, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, mortgage debt, Multics, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, profit maximization, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, tech worker, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, too big to fail, urban planning, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Those who maintain that we”: Jacky Davis, John Lister, and David Wrigley, NHS for Sale: Myths, Lies, and Deception (London: Merlin Press, 2015), loc. 916, Kindle. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT The conference, put on by the right-wing think tank: Account drawn from conference program, “A Lot More for a Lot Less: Disruptive Innovation in Healthcare,” Reform conference sponsored by McKinsey. Henke and the McKinsey consultant Tom Kibasi wrote a brief article for the program titled “Disruptive Innovation.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “The wise and virtuous man”: Dominic Barton, “Capitalism for the Long Term,” Harvard Business Review, March 2011. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT It came as no surprise: Daniel Boffey, “NHS Reforms: American Consultancy McKinsey in Conflict of Interest Row,” Guardian, Nov. 5, 2011.

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As if to drive home that point, on June 8, 2011, McKinsey was the corporate sponsor for a conference at the Royal College of Nursing, which had turned its stunning Georgian mansion on Cavendish Square into a venue available for corporate events. The conference, put on by the right-wing think tank Reform, was titled “A Lot More for a Lot Less: Disruptive Innovation in Healthcare.” “Disruptive” meant a wider berth for private companies. The group argued that “for-profit companies and not-for-profit organizations are delivering healthcare successfully around the world and doing so at greater value and with equal, if not better, quality.” The McKinsey senior partner Nicolaus Henke, the firm’s representative on the prime minister’s kitchen cabinet on health, took part in the one-day conference, joined by two other McKinsey consultants.

The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite by Duff McDonald

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, deskilling, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, eat what you kill, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, impact investing, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, new economy, obamacare, oil shock, pattern recognition, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, pushing on a string, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, survivorship bias, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, urban renewal, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

McGill’s Henry Mintzberg, asked for his two cents, also suggested that Christensen was seeing things that just weren’t there. “I think Clay is a fabulous guy, but he makes one fundamental error, which is that he couldn’t have predicted any of these disruptive innovations any more than anybody else,” said Mintzberg. “[So] for him to say that this is going to be a disruptive innovation, I think, is questionable.”8 As far as Nohria is concerned, the fact that five years before the launch of CORe he declared that HBS would never deign to launch something like HBX—that the HBS experience was too much about being at HBS itself to even consider an online alternative—shows that the dean is capable of changing his position on a matter of great significance to the School.

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They get better. What do we do? Nothing.”12 Michael Porter represents the best and worst of HBS all at once. First and foremost, he broke new ground in the field of strategy. With the possible exception of his colleague Clayton Christensen, who can be credited with popularizing the concept of “disruptive innovation,” Porter’s work represents the high-water mark of intellectual influence at HBS, at least in terms of having some influence over the language that decision makers use as they go about their business. That his signature insight was as simple as the inversion of an already extant field of economic analysis doesn’t take away from the fact that he has achieved an astounding level of influence, both for himself and for HBS.

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Porter created a template for all future HBS professors to aspire to, the one-man conglomerate around whom a consulting business, speaking engagements, and bestselling books revolve. The man who has come closest to replicating the Porter business model is Clayton Christensen, with his theory of disruptive innovation. He’s Porter’s Mini-Me. (To dedicate a chapter to Christensen would be duplicative. It’s the same story, with different names and different pseudotheories.) Indeed, Porter set the model that almost all business schools now aspire to, the cultivation of star professors, of branded ideas, and of ancillary revenue streams in publishing and elsewhere—Wharton’s Jeremy Siegel and Stanford’s Jeffrey Pfeffer being two obvious examples of such.

Matchmakers: The New Economics of Multisided Platforms by David S. Evans, Richard Schmalensee

Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Andy Rubin, big-box store, business process, cashless society, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disruptive innovation, if you build it, they will come, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Lyft, M-Pesa, market friction, market microstructure, Max Levchin, mobile money, multi-sided market, Network effects, PalmPilot, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Wayback Machine, winner-take-all economy

Not coincidentally, there has been a steady and substantial increase in the relative importance of warehouse clubs and other supercenters since around 2000.16 Innovation has also given retailers better ways to sell. But that doesn’t make it easy for many of them to figure out what to do. The Three Waves of Retail Disruption Turbocharged multisided platforms are behind three waves of disruptive innovation that have changed how people shop and buy. This is well beyond the simple “sexy matchmaker kills boring single-sided business” story, though. The first wave of disruption came from the expansion of fixed broadband providers. These businesses connected American households and Internet content providers.

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With its huge scale and knowledge of its many regular customers, Blockbuster might well have been able to make the shift. Of course, it faced the problems all incumbents have. It may have lacked the technical and business skills that enabled Netflix and others to succeed. Or, like many successful firms facing disruptive innovation, it may just have been too wedded to the approach that had made it successful.21 Video streaming of movies and television shows is a capital-intensive national business requiring significant scale. Smaller video rental stores couldn’t have pivoted to operating streaming video services. Instead, some have tried to diversify into selling coffee or party supplies.22 Others have stayed the course, perhaps simply unwilling to accept that there’s a gale set to knock their shops down.

We-Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production by Charles Leadbeater

1960s counterculture, Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, c2.com, call centre, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, death of newspapers, Debian, digital divide, digital Maoism, disruptive innovation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, folksonomy, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, game design, Garrett Hardin, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, lone genius, M-Pesa, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, microcredit, Mitch Kapor, new economy, Nicholas Carr, online collectivism, Paradox of Choice, planetary scale, post scarcity, public intellectual, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social web, software patent, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Almost a decade after clunkers first hit mountain tracks, the commercial bike manufacturers finally followed suit. By 2004, in the US mountain bikes and related equipment accounted for 65 per cent of all bike sales. A category that had been invented by passionate users was worth $58 billion dollars. The biggest disruptive innovation in modern biking history came from consumer innovators. Something similar has happened in other extreme sports, such as windsurfing and snowboarding. One study suggests that in active sports about 57 per cent of significant innovations have come from consumers. Where technology has many possible applications, the users rather than the producers often work out what it is really for.

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Where technology has many possible applications, the users rather than the producers often work out what it is really for. Mobile-phone companies failed to predict that SMS messaging would become one of the main forms of communication among teenagers. Only when the technology fell into the hands of users did the full range of its application begin to emerge. Consumer innovators are often also critical to disruptive innovations that upset an entire market. Mainstream companies working in mass markets often have powerful incentives not to innovate: they tend to reinforce past success and overlook small, emerging markets where there is little money to be made. In those marginal markets, passionate users, who are not interested in making a big profit, often carry innovation forward.

Hands-On RESTful API Design Patterns and Best Practices by Harihara Subramanian

blockchain, business logic, business process, cloud computing, continuous integration, create, read, update, delete, cyber-physical system, data science, database schema, DevOps, disruptive innovation, domain-specific language, fault tolerance, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, inventory management, job automation, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kubernetes, loose coupling, Lyft, machine readable, microservices, MITM: man-in-the-middle, MVC pattern, Salesforce, self-driving car, semantic web, single page application, smart cities, smart contracts, software as a service, SQL injection, supply-chain management, web application, WebSocket

The well-known edge technologies include disappearing sensors, actuators, multifaceted micro- and nano-scale electronics, miniaturized stickers, pads, tags, barcodes, chips, controllers, specks, beacons, and LEDs. The seamless combination of digital and edge technologies enables the mandated disruption, innovation, and transformation to dynamically and dexterously tend toward the IT vision, which is all about creating smarter homes, hotels, and hospitals. The emergence of the microservices architecture (MSA) is being touted as the most interesting and inspiring thing for business and IT organizations across the globe.

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The faster maturity and stability of enterprise service bus (ESB) products has expedited the setting up and sustenance of service-oriented, integrated, and insight-driven enterprises. The API-driven integration of disengaged services for producing integrated systems is attracting a lot of attention. In short, worldwide enterprises are embracing APIs as a strategic path to achieve the much-touted digital disruption, innovation, and transformation. External APIs opens the way for clients' developers to implement and involve the exposed APIs to connect and collaborate with the software application. The remote monitoring, measuring, and managing of applications is being made possible by means of externally exposed APIs.

The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money by Bryan Caplan

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, assortative mating, behavioural economics, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, deliberate practice, deskilling, disruptive innovation, do what you love, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, experimental subject, fear of failure, Flynn Effect, future of work, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, hive mind, job satisfaction, Kenneth Arrow, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, profit maximization, publication bias, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, school choice, selection bias, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, trickle-down economics, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, yield curve, zero-sum game

Online competition has already crushed traditional record companies, newspapers, and retailers. Brick-and-mortar schools are next in line. If the technophiles are right, squabbling about education spending is pretty pointless. Taxpayers are wasting billions on obsolete business models, but why fight over a sinking ship? Government cannot stop the power of disruptive innovation. If you want to make a difference, forget about education policy. Found an online education startup, and become the change you wish to see in the world. When I explain the centrality of signaling, audiences often think I’m endorsing the technophiles’ story. This utterly misunderstands me.

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Once online education dominates the market, students at traditional schools will be stigmatized as “nonconformists.” BRYAN: Alas, there’s a catch-22. Online education won’t escape the nonconformist stigma until it dominates the market, but it won’t dominate the market until it escapes the nonconformists stigma. GILLIAN: You’re kidding yourself, professor. No industry is immune to the power of disruptive innovation. Including your own. BRYAN: “Immune” is a strong word. But schools have weathered such storms for centuries. Conformity signaling elegantly explains their resilience. I wish you were right about the future, but you’re the one who’s kidding herself. CYNTHIA: You keep insisting that school “signals conformity.”

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“Does Education Raise Productivity, or Just Reflect It?” Economic Journal 114 (499): F499–F517. Chi, Michelene, and Kurt VanLehn. 2012. “Seeing Deep Structure from the Interactions of Surface Features.” Educational Psychologist 47 (3): 177–88. Christensen, Clayton, Michael Horn, Louis Caldera, and Louis Soares. 2011. Disrupting College: How Disruptive Innovation Can Deliver Quality and Affordability to Postsecondary Education. Washington DC: Center for American Progress. https://cdn.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/issues/2011/02/pdf/disrupting_college.pdf. Chua, Amy. 2011. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. London: Bloomsbury. Ciccone, Antonio, and Giovanni Peri. 2006.

Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil by Hamish McKenzie

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Ben Horowitz, business climate, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, connected car, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Hyperloop, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, megacity, Menlo Park, Nikolai Kondratiev, oil shale / tar sands, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Solyndra, South China Sea, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, Zenefits, Zipcar

But I don’t think that we should just disrupt things, unless that disruption is going to result in something fundamentally better for society.” The business world had come to fear the word disruption because of The Innovator’s Dilemma, a 1997 book by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen that introduced the concept of “disruptive innovation.” The Innovator’s Dilemma, lauded by The Economist as one of the most important books about business ever written, lays out how market-leading companies can miss out on new waves of innovation by focusing on the needs of their existing customers to maximize profits while overlooking new and cheaper technologies or business models that customers didn’t realize they wanted.

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“And this gives an opportunity for innovation for new companies and new entrants to play on a bit more of a level playing field than there ever was in the past.” Tesla, however, is not a disrupter by Clayton Christensen’s original definition of the theory. In a December 2015 article published by the Harvard Business Review, Christensen and his coauthors, Michael Raynor and Rory McDonald, said Tesla didn’t fit the disruptive innovation model because its foothold was in the high-end segment of the auto market. Far from representing a marginal technology, Tesla’s entry to the market had elicited significant attention and investment from established competitors. “If disruption theory is correct,” Christensen concluded, “Tesla’s future holds either acquisition by a much larger incumbent or a years-long and hard-fought battle for market significance.”

The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere by Kevin Carey

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, business intelligence, carbon-based life, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, declining real wages, deliberate practice, discrete time, disruptive innovation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, Fairchild Semiconductor, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, informal economy, invention of the printing press, inventory management, John Markoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, natural language processing, Network effects, open borders, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, transcontinental railway, uber lyft, Vannevar Bush

The receptionist brought us to a conference room with typically spare and modern décor: glossy brown conference table, white leather and stainless steel chairs, and modern art. In the middle of the desk was, incongruously, a six-inch-high toy model of Godzilla with pieces of candy stuck in his teeth and claws. Mike told us he is a big fan of Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen’s work, which was not surprising. Christensen’s theory of “disruptive innovation” holds that change comes when start-up companies use technology to sell low-value products and services to the fringes of a given market. The dominant players in the market ignore this, because they’re fat and happy selling highly profitable products to the richest customers. A favorite example is Toyota selling cheap cars in the 1960s while Ford and General Motors built Lincolns and Cadillacs.

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Like nearly everyone thinking seriously about the future of higher education from inside a hybrid university, Lue proposes a win-win scenario: Professors take advantage of the new world of free online resources to do a much better job teaching. But there are some with a gloomier view. Clay Christensen, the Harvard business school professor and the high priest of the disruptive innovation theory that is treated like holy scripture in Silicon Valley, had recently characterized so-called blended courses—professors combined with computers—as analogous to steamboats with sails. The first steam-powered boats to cross the oceans were fitted with sails as a precaution while the steam technology became more powerful and reliable, and because it’s hard to go from one way of working to another way overnight.

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bilateral investment treaty, Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, ending welfare as we know it, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Firefox, first-past-the-post, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, information retrieval, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, investor state dispute settlement, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, megaproject, mini-job, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Kinnock, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, openstreetmap, patent troll, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, quantitative easing, remote working, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, structural adjustment programs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, Zipcar

In a seminal book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen argued that innovation was ‘disruptive’ if it had the potential to generate new products or services or to deliver them in radically new ways.3 He and colleagues later claimed that the provision of services through digital platforms did not meet two criteria for disruptive innovation – that the innovation must target the low end of an existing market and mainly draw in non-consumers of existing options.4 But digital platforms surely qualify as disruptive on both counts. Uber, for example, has expanded the market for taxi services by offering cheap rides, drawing in users previously put off by high prices and lack of flexibility of traditional taxi services.

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Dobbs, Connecting Talent with Opportunity in the Digital Age (New York: McKinsey Global Institute, June 2015). 3 C. Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 1997). 4 C. Christensen, M. Raynor and R. McDonald, ‘What is disruptive innovation?’, Harvard Business Review, 2015. 5 M. Harris, ‘Uber: Why the world’s biggest ride-sharing company has no drivers’, The Guardian, 16 November 2015. 6 S. Jackman, ‘Crowdsourcing may hold key to unlocking Japan’s working potential’, Japan News, 2 January 2015. 7 Cited in S. O’Connor, ‘The human cloud: A new world of work’, Financial Times, 8 October 2015. 8 Associated Press, ‘US companies increasingly turning to temporary workers to fill positions’, Fox News, 8 July 2013. 9 Cited in The Economist, 13 June 2015, p. 57. 10 B.

The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, Chris Yeh

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, centralized clearinghouse, cloud computing, disruptive innovation, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, new economy, pre–internet, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, software as a service, Steve Jobs

Getting Value from Entrepreneurial Talent We three authors come from a business environment where the employment alliance has already taken root—the high-tech start-up community of Silicon Valley. It’s the best place in the world for adaptation and innovation, as demonstrated by its economic growth over the past decade. If you want your organization to be able to survive and thrive in an environment where change is rapid and disruptive innovation rampant, you need to develop the adaptability that is the hallmark of this ecosystem. Obviously, not every industry works like Silicon Valley, nor should many established companies attempt wholesale adoption of start-up strategies. The question is which lessons from Silicon Valley are generally applicable.

Smart Machines: IBM's Watson and the Era of Cognitive Computing (Columbia Business School Publishing) by John E. Kelly Iii

AI winter, book value, call centre, carbon footprint, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, demand response, discovery of DNA, disruptive innovation, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of work, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Internet of things, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Mars Rover, natural language processing, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, planetary scale, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Feynman, smart grid, smart meter, speech recognition, TED Talk, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

With its superior navigation and abundance of easy-to-use applications, this breakthrough product spawned a burst of smartphone innovation, which combined with the social-networking phenomenon to produce a revolutionary shift in global human behavior. Yet, technologically, the iPhone was built on top of many smartphone advances that preceded it. New waves of progress, however, require majorly disruptive innovations—things like the transistor, the microchip, and the first programmable computers. These are the advances that fundamentally change our world. Today, many of the core technologies that provide the basic functions for traditional computers are mature; they have been in use for decades. In some cases, each wave of improvements is less profound than the wave that preceded it.

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future by Martin Ford

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, bond market vigilante , business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, creative destruction, data science, debt deflation, deep learning, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Freestyle chess, full employment, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, High speed trading, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large language model, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, McJob, moral hazard, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, optical character recognition, passive income, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, precision agriculture, price mechanism, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, reshoring, RFID, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological singularity, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

It seems impossible to imagine that such an immeasurable increase in our overall computing capacity won’t eventually have dramatic consequences in a variety of scientific and technical fields. Nonetheless, the primary determinant of the positions of the technology S-curves we’ll need to reach in order to have truly disruptive innovation is still the applicable laws of nature. Computational capability can’t change that reality, but it may well help researchers to bridge some of the gaps. The economists who believe we have hit a technological plateau typically have deep faith in the relationship between the pace of innovation and the realization of broad-based prosperity; the implication is that if we can just jump-start technological progress on a broad front, median incomes will once again begin increasing in real terms.

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Imagine a future where college students can attend free online courses taught by Harvard or Stanford professors and subsequently receive a credential that would be acceptable to employers or graduate schools. Who, then, would be willing to go into debt in order to pay the tuition at a third- or fourth-tier institution? Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School and an expert in disruptive innovation within industries, has predicted that the answer to that question will result in a grim future for thousands of institutions. In a 2013 interview, Christensen said that “15 years from now, half of US universities may be in bankruptcy.”22 Even if most institutions remain solvent, it is easy to imagine dramatically declining enrollments and revenues coupled with massive layoffs of both administrators and faculty.

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Even during the chaos following Kenya’s disputed 2008 elections—a terrifying spasm of ethnic strife—Oserian’s five thousand employees reported for work dutifully each morning, more afraid of losing their monthly salaries of $80 (plus benefits) than they were of any mobs. The London tabloids pleaded with Britons to buy Kenyan roses for Valentine’s Day to help the victims. Like other disruptive innovations, Kenyan roses entered the market at the bottom, with a reputation for being cheap instead of good. Compared to light- and climate-controlled Dutch greenhouses, Kenyan farms (or Colombian, for that matter) are decidedly low-tech, low-cost affairs. Their flowers take shelter under plastic sheets, or are left to grow in the ground and open air.

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His flagship clinic in Bangalore has six times as many beds as the average U.S. hospital, and his army of cardiac surgeons perform twice as many surgeries as their American colleagues. The question isn’t why is surgery in India or Thailand so cheap; it’s why is surgery in America so expensive. For someone like Toral, the hypertrophied medical-industrial complex is just begging for a dose of disruptive innovation. He calls his vision the “Toyota-ization of health care”—just as Japan’s automakers went from being cheaper to better than their American counterparts, so too will Asian surgeons. In his view, medical tourism as we know it is giving way to “globalized health care.” Hospital chains at home will buy, partner with, or even sell out to foreign rivals like Bumrungrad, creating world-wide aerial networks of patients who will hopscotch across continents chasing the best care and costs.

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In a single year, netbooks captured 7 percent of the world’s entire laptop market; the next year they doubled that, as laptops outsold desktops for the first time ever. In Europe, wireless carriers began giving them away for free to lure new customers. Without meaning to, netbooks had paved the way for the PC’s extinction. ASUSTeK didn’t take it upon itself to invent just a new product; they invented a new category. It’s a classic example of the disruptive innovations Clayton Christensen describes in The Innovator’s Dilemma—a cheap, seemingly inferior imitator appears to gut the incumbents’ business models. In this case, their only response was to hire the insurgents to slap their names on the same models. Suddenly, the Taiwanese firms and their mainland factories were dictating terms to the rest of the industry.

Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking by Michael Bhaskar

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, call centre, carbon tax, charter city, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cognitive load, Columbian Exchange, coronavirus, cosmic microwave background, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cyber-physical system, dark matter, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Eroom's law, fail fast, false flag, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, Haber-Bosch Process, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, hive mind, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, lockdown, lone genius, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Gell-Mann, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, nudge unit, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-truth, precautionary principle, public intellectual, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, Slavoj Žižek, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, techlash, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, total factor productivity, transcontinental railway, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, When a measure becomes a target, X Prize, Y Combinator

Rather than deploy an over-rigid scheme, I am interested in identifying an overtly flexible framework; a wide-angle lens, rather than a tight taxonomic grid. For the most part, we recognise big breakthrough ideas. They cause crises in normal science; they punctuate disciplinary equilibria; they are disruptive innovations, new genres of cultural production, moments of outstanding genius. Not only do they allow us to calculate volume; as we will see, they confirm the germ theory of disease, enable heavier-than-air flight and redefine the nature of music. They are landmarks of enquiry: Newton's Principia, Harvey's Motion, Lavoisier's Chemistry, Lyell's Geology, Smith's Wealth of Nations, Darwin's Origin of Species, Freud's Interpretation of Dreams.

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., p. 207 15 Gould (2007), p. 3 16 Rather than a straight porting of the concept he was willing to explore ‘homologies’, but only in a limited set of circumstances. Ibid., p. 266 17 Mokyr (1999) 18 Christensen (2013); Perez (2002). On a more local level we might look to what Louis Galambos called ‘formative’ innovations and Clayton Christensen ‘disruptive’ innovations. 19 Bahcall (2019) 20 Thiel (2014) 21 Kelly et al (2020) 22 For an alternative methodology with technology see for example Packalen and Bhattacharya (2012) or Funk and Owens-Smith (2017). 23 See for example a paper like Bhattacharya and Packalen (2020) for means of categorising science. 24 See Jockers (2013) or Moretti (2013) 25 Henrich (2009) 26 Epstein (2019) 27 See Hargadon (2003) for the concept of ‘technology brokering’ more widely, or Ridley (2020) for more on recombinant innovation.

Tomorrow's Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future by Richard Susskind

business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, disruptive innovation, global supply chain, information retrieval, invention of the wheel, power law, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, supply-chain management, telepresence, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

When I probe more deeply, it transpires that many GCs would prefer off-the-shelf answers developed by law firms. However, and this is something of a vicious circle, there is, as noted, little incentive for law firms themselves to support either the efficiency or the collaboration strategy. Why should law firms destabilize their current businesses with potentially disruptive innovations when clients often seem indifferent and competitors themselves are inactive? In-house lawyers must also remember that they are likely themselves to come under the microscope within their own organizations. It will not be plausible for them simply to complain ad infinitum about law firms’ unwillingness to change.

Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet by Varun Sivaram

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, asset light, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, bitcoin, blockchain, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, Colonization of Mars, currency risk, decarbonisation, deep learning, demand response, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, gigafactory, global supply chain, global village, Google Earth, hive mind, hydrogen economy, index fund, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, low interest rates, M-Pesa, market clearing, market design, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, mobile money, Negawatt, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shock, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, renewable energy transition, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, SoftBank, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, Ted Nordhaus, Tesla Model S, time value of money, undersea cable, vertical integration, wikimedia commons

At the time, silicon solar panels—in addition to their hefty weight, rigid shape, and ugly aesthetics—were expensive, making the cost of their electricity more than twice that from the grid.1 Silicon was a costly commodity, and the process for manufacturing solar cells was adapted from that for producing expensive microchips. Roscheisen, formerly an Internet entrepreneur, planned to apply Silicon Valley’s model of disruptive innovation to upend the lumbering solar industry. It was an exhilarating time to be in solar. Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth had captivated the country. Investors were juiced at the prospect of red-hot market growth, running up the stock market valuations of early solar companies. At Nanosolar, the culture was infectiously optimistic.

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But it is still the case that most of these firms’ R&D expenses remain targeted at incrementally improving existing silicon technology. Technology disruption is simply not the aspiration for most Chinese firms. Rather, their preferred route to a better market position has been vertical or horizontal consolidation.69 It’s clear, now that China and silicon have won the day, that the solar industry plans to steer clear of disruptive innovation. The industry has come of age. Yet, that dearth of innovation should be deeply worrying to anyone hoping for a solar-powered future. Notes 1.  Kevin Bullis, “A Price Drop for Solar Panels,” MIT Technology Review, October 22, 2012, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/410064/a-price-drop-for-solar-panels. 2.  

The Internet of Money by Andreas M. Antonopoulos

AltaVista, altcoin, bitcoin, blockchain, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cryptocurrency, disruptive innovation, Dogecoin, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial exclusion, global reserve currency, information security, litecoin, London Interbank Offered Rate, Marc Andreessen, Oculus Rift, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, QR code, ransomware, reserve currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, the medium is the message, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, underbanked, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Bitcoin as a Mechanism to Opt In and Opt Out If you understand that bitcoin is a technology and not just a currency, you can truly grasp the importance it has. Again, it’s not about us. It is about the other 6 1/2 billion. It is about the ability to bring to the world a level of financial integration that the world has never seen before. From our perspective in the privileged world, it is a great technology. We can do some disruptive innovation. We can build some interesting services. But if you’re a Kenyan farmer who’s trying to raise money in order to buy seed, and now you can do decentralized peer-to-peer lending and reach out to lenders from all across the globe, this is not just a technology—this is truly life-changing. "Bitcoin is about the ability to bring to the world a level of financial integration that the world has never seen before."

Money, Real Quick: The Story of M-PESA by Tonny K. Omwansa, Nicholas P. Sullivan, The Guardian

Blue Ocean Strategy, BRICs, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, cashless society, cloud computing, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, democratizing finance, digital divide, disruptive innovation, end-to-end encryption, financial exclusion, financial innovation, financial intermediation, income per capita, Kibera, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, microcredit, mobile money, Network effects, new economy, reserve currency, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, software as a service, tontine, transaction costs

For everyone, cash is the enemy—expensive to print, hard to store and move. Dematerializing money is good for people rich and poor, businesses, and governments. Mobile money, e-money, e-float, e-wallets, mobile banking, however you characterize it, is not just a cool app. It’s a killer app, the first for mobile phones in the developing world. It’s also a disruptive innovation that threatens incumbent businesses and is sparking new business formation and entrepreneurship. Nowhere is this mobile money phenomenon more prevalent and successful than in Kenya, an East African country of 40 million people. In five years, 19 ******ebook converter DEMO Watermarks******* million Kenyans, nearly 70% of the adult population, have signed up for mobile money services.

Escape From Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity by Walter Scheidel

agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, conceptual framework, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, disruptive innovation, Easter island, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flying shuttle, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, means of production, Multics, Network effects, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer lending, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, secular stagnation, South China Sea, spinning jenny, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, vertical integration, zero-sum game

In turn, prioritization of maintenance and conservatism supported delegational localism that limited the state’s ability to penetrate society. In the case of China, the overall result was a sociopolitical order that helped secure peace and basic welfare for a large population but did not lend itself to disruptive innovation. It generated Smithian growth by promoting division of labor, market integration, and intensification of established techniques but could not lastingly overcome Malthusian constraints. The differences between these two schematic scenarios are relative, not absolute. Innovation did occur in China, and the societies of early modern Europe labored under the burden of inherited elite privilege and rampant corruption.

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Mokyr thus plausibly contends that “had a single, centralized government been in charge of defending the intellectual status quo, many of the new ideas that eventually led to the Enlightenment would have been suppressed or possibly never even proposed.”11 But these networks effects also highlight the limits of fragmentation: although political pluralism was essential in ensuring free discourse, so was the relative ease of transnational intellectual communications. In the absence of some degree of underlying cultural unity, the costs of catering to a larger market of ideas would have been higher, limiting entry and competition and protecting incumbents from disruptive innovation. This cultural unity—manifest above all in the use of Latin and Christian norms—was a legacy of the Roman empire: later polycentrism was made more productive by a shared background of antecedent, if safely distant, hegemonic empire. I revisit this issue in the Epilogue. For now, suffice it to note that whereas the widespread use of Latin as an elite language undeniably served to maintain and reinforce connections beyond individual polities, persistence of its privileged position would have limited access to useful knowledge beyond refined circles.

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The violent demise of Warring States pluralism discouraged “intellectual vigor and élan”: a key proponent of Confucian thought under the Western Han, Dong Zhonshu, called for the suppression of “perverse teachings” so as “to unify governing principles, to clarify laws and measures; and the people will know what to follow.”22 As already noted, serial imperial reconstitution gradually cemented the hegemony of neo-Confucianism over the course of the second millennium. Upholding an orthodoxy that valued stability and continuity above all else, it was structurally inimical to disruptive innovation. The fact that Confucian thought was primarily social, more interested in human relations than in nature, contributed to its utility as a means of preserving the established order but not to scientific curiosity.23 In late imperial China, the canonization of neo-Confucian compendia furthered a closing of the literati elite’s mind.

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by Antonio Garcia Martinez

Airbnb, airport security, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Big Tech, Burning Man, business logic, Celtic Tiger, centralized clearinghouse, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, content marketing, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, drop ship, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, financial engineering, financial independence, Gary Kildall, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Hacker News, hive mind, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, information asymmetry, information security, interest rate swap, intermodal, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, means of production, Menlo Park, messenger bag, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, second-price auction, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Socratic dialogue, source of truth, Steve Jobs, tech worker, telemarketer, the long tail, undersea cable, urban renewal, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Or do they look like they got ingested by a blue whale and spent three days transiting its digestive system? Total commitment, like unconditional love, is the only type that matters. The bike-riding, date-night-going types will never give everything to a company or an idea, and are nothing more than complacent bourgeois, whatever trappings of the “disruptive innovator” they may sport, often in the form of ponderous blog posts or a bookshelf of bound B-school-level bloviation. The ones who could pass for a homeless person, though, those are the startup kamikazes who will give everything for the entrepreneurial cause, and are stopped only by death or jail.

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.* In keeping with the engineering-first cultures of most tech companies since Google, hackathons had also come to serve as pep rally–like pageants of Facebookness, more than mere excuses to code all night and eat crappy Chinese food. As I’d later learn, weirdly pointless versions of them would be held in the regional offices where no engineers even worked, as a sort of pagan celebration of the values of do-it-yourself creation, total commitment to the company, and disruptive innovation. Pedram was here to expound on those same values. We had gotten the prophetic vision from Cox, precisely the sort of seductive propagandizing a product person does. Now it was time to hear about the martial virtues that would make that vision a reality, which was the engineer’s duty. A tall, broad-shouldered figure in a Facebook T-shirt who looked as though he worked out, Pedram commanded us in a hectoring tone: “Whatever you learned at your previous job, whatever politics and bullshit you’re bringing with you, just leave all that shit behind.”

Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future by Mervyn King, John Kay

Airbus A320, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, algorithmic trading, anti-fragile, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Black Swan, Boeing 737 MAX, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, capital asset pricing model, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, DeepMind, demographic transition, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, easy for humans, difficult for computers, eat what you kill, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial deregulation, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, Goodhart's law, Hans Rosling, Helicobacter pylori, high-speed rail, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, Money creation, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, nudge theory, oil shock, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, popular electronics, power law, price mechanism, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, sealed-bid auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Socratic dialogue, South Sea Bubble, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Suez crisis 1956, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, ultimatum game, urban planning, value at risk, world market for maybe five computers, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

The underlying growth trend of the economy was interrupted from time to time by these shocks and a return to equilibrium slowed by these frictions. Of course, consumer tastes do change and respond to new products and new fashions. And productivity is affected by disruptive innovation. But there was no explanation of the sources, let alone the size and volatility, of preference shifts or disruptive innovation, nor could their incidence be characterised by any probability distribution. There was only the need for some deus ex machina to reconcile the model with observed data. 20 Productivity has been described as the measure of our ignorance. 21 The distribution of productivity shocks is then the measure of our ignorance of our ignorance.

The Misfit Economy: Lessons in Creativity From Pirates, Hackers, Gangsters and Other Informal Entrepreneurs by Alexa Clay, Kyra Maya Phillips

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Burning Man, collaborative consumption, conceptual framework, cotton gin, creative destruction, different worldview, digital rights, disruptive innovation, double helix, fear of failure, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer rental, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, supply-chain management, union organizing, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Zipcar

Wrote Zuckerberg: “We have the words ‘Done is better than perfect’ painted on our walls to remind ourselves to always keep chipping.” With Facebook claiming a hacker ethic, we can certainly see the risk of corporations who look to co-opt hacker subculture. But co-optation is only one of the ways in which the hacker movement is mainstreaming. A lot of the hacker ethic is still oriented around disruptive innovation and challenging the underlying logics and norms of the establishment, and these are the cases we’re interested in—the hackers who are changing systems. HACKING THE ESTABLISHMENT Ivan Arreguín-Toft, an expert in asymmetric conflict, analyzed battles between larger armies and their smaller adversaries in his study “How the Weak Win Wars.”17 He found that in roughly 30 percent of these asymmetrical battles over the last two hundred years, the smaller, outnumbered army prevailed.

The Second Curve: Thoughts on Reinventing Society by Charles Handy

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, bonus culture, British Empire, call centre, Clayton Christensen, corporate governance, delayed gratification, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Edward Snowden, falling living standards, future of work, G4S, greed is good, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, late capitalism, mass immigration, megacity, mittelstand, Occupy movement, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, sharing economy, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, Veblen good, Walter Mischel

Only in retrospect can we look back and say, ‘That was it, that was the peak, that was when we should have started to think anew.’ Unfortunately, being wise after the event is too late to be useful. First-curve success can blind one to the possibilities of a new technology or a new market, allowing others to seize the initiative. Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School termed it the problem of disruptive innovation, citing, among many others, the case of Kodak, who ignored the possibilities of digital photography until it was too late. They allowed outsiders to intrude and, in my words, create the new curve instead of them. New technology is offering the chance of those new curves every day. Spotting them and seizing them is the new strategic challenge for education, health and government as well as business.

Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition by Michael J. Mauboussin

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, butter production in bangladesh, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, disruptive innovation, Edward Thorp, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial innovation, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Akerlof, hindsight bias, hiring and firing, information asymmetry, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, money market fund, Murray Gell-Mann, Netflix Prize, pattern recognition, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Philip Mirowski, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, power law, prediction markets, presumed consent, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, statistical model, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, ultimatum game, vertical integration

Flawed research that draws common attributes from organizations that have done well and offers those attributes as a general prescription for winning is also popular. Neither mistake properly considers decisions in context. One positive example is an exercise that Thomas Thurston, a former Intel employee, completed in 2006. Steeped in the theory of disruptive innovation, which is based on circumstances, Thurston reviewed almost fifty business plans that Intel’s new business initiatives group had funded. Applying the theory that specifies when innovations succeed, he was able to predict, without knowledge of the outcomes, a statistically significant 85 percent of successes and failures.19 Further, he was able to identify where some of the failed businesses had gone wrong.

Breathtaking: Inside the NHS in a Time of Pandemic by Rachel Clarke

Airbnb, Boris Johnson, call centre, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, disruptive innovation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, global pandemic, lockdown, social distancing, zero-sum game

You do realise you’re wearing one grey sock, one blue?’ He frowns, glances down, then looks up in surprise. ‘Oh dear. Am I letting the side down on compassionate excellence?’ We both crack a smile. ‘Come on,’ I admonish him. ‘At least make an effort to be half full about it. Personally, I see your socks as disruptive innovation, Sam.’ He laughs. Our hatred of NHS management jargon was spawned in our first ever hospital induction when a man in a suit told us we were not being inducted but rather ‘onboarded’ since this was no run-of-the-mill induction at all, this was something bigger, better, full of dazzle and panache – an onboarding, whatever that meant, of the newest members of the corporate family.

The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated by Gautam Baid

Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, backtesting, barriers to entry, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, business process, buy and hold, Cal Newport, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, do what you love, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fear index, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, follow your passion, framing effect, George Santayana, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Singleton, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, index fund, intangible asset, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Masayoshi Son, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive income, passive investing, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, six sigma, software as a service, software is eating the world, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, subscription business, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, tail risk, Teledyne, the market place, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening. —Tom Goodwin “We are living in an ever-changing world” is both a cliché and an understatement. Regulations change all the time, new technologies emerge, unique business models evolve, and disruptive innovations take shape across all walks of life. It is an exciting time to be alive. Rockets are landing themselves, cars are driving themselves, and money is governing itself. In addition, the ongoing switch from “ownership that you purchase” to “access that you subscribe to” overruns many conventions.

…

Chan Kim, Youngme Moon, and Bruce Greenwald educated me on competitive strategy. Peter Bernstein, Howard Marks, and Seth Klarman gave me the wisdom to appreciate the role of risk and risk management. Peter Thiel taught me the significance of monopolies, power laws, and highly innovative companies. Clayton Christensen made me aware of the constant threats posed by disruptive innovation. Peter Bevelin gave me some of the finest pieces of work on multidisciplinary thinking and inversion. Thornton Oglove, Howard Schilit, and Charles Mulford educated me on how to assess the quality of reported earnings. Stephen Penman and Baruch Lev taught me the finer nuances of interpreting accounting information from the vantage point of a business analyst and a value investor.

Blockchain Basics: A Non-Technical Introduction in 25 Steps by Daniel Drescher

bitcoin, blockchain, business process, central bank independence, collaborative editing, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, job automation, linked data, machine readable, peer-to-peer, place-making, Satoshi Nakamoto, smart contracts, transaction costs

• Tax: Calculating and collecting taxes based on transactions or on sole ownership, reducing tax avoidance,2 or double taxation. • Voting: Creating, distributing, and counting digital ballot papers. • Record management: Creation and storing of medical records. 1World Economic Forum. The future of financial services—How disruptive innovations are reshaping the way financial services are structured, provisioned and consumed. An Industry Project of the Financial Services Community, 2015; World Economic Forum. The future of financial infrastructure—An ambitious look at how blockchain can reshape financial services. An Industry Project of the Financial Services Community, 2016; Foroglou, George, and Anna-Lali Tsilidou.

Big Data at Work: Dispelling the Myths, Uncovering the Opportunities by Thomas H. Davenport

Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, bioinformatics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, cloud computing, commoditize, data acquisition, data science, disruptive innovation, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, intermodal, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, lifelogging, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, New Journalism, recommendation engine, RFID, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, sorting algorithm, statistical model, Tesla Model S, text mining, Thomas Davenport, three-martini lunch

Since the exploitation of big data can involve new products and services (in addition to internal decision support), there may well need to be more integration of big data initiative targeting with product development and strategy processes. If you’re developing a new product, can there be a big data adjunct to it—perhaps in the form of a service? If you’re thinking about disruptive innovations in your industry, how might big data contribute to them? Analysts for Big Data I have largely covered this topic in chapter 4, where I discussed the human side of big data. The only issue to address here is whether smart human analysts are any more important with big data than they were with traditional analytics.

China's Disruptors: How Alibaba, Xiaomi, Tencent, and Other Companies Are Changing the Rules of Business by Edward Tse

3D printing, Airbnb, Airbus A320, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, bilateral investment treaty, business process, capital controls, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Graeber, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, experimental economics, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, industrial robot, Joseph Schumpeter, Lyft, Masayoshi Son, middle-income trap, money market fund, offshore financial centre, Pearl River Delta, reshoring, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, trade route, wealth creators, working-age population

Given the continuing growth and ever greater complexity of the China market and its hyperintensive competition, especially in its open sectors, he has to be on the search for new things to do and new ways of doing them that will allow them to leapfrog over others both domestically and internationally. Zhang Yue is not alone in his search for disruptive innovations. Victor Koo’s Youku Tudou also offers a glimpse of just how different China will be in the not-so-distant future. His company offers people freedom to watch videos of their choice, anytime and from anywhere. Along with all the various forms of social media and messaging apps available to people in China, plus the e-commerce option, Yukou Tudou and China’s other online video services are already watched more on mobile devices than on computers, a trend that will become more pronounced as hundreds of millions of new smartphones and tablets are sold in China in the next few years.

Confessions of a Crypto Millionaire: My Unlikely Escape From Corporate America by Dan Conway

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, bank run, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, buy and hold, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, financial independence, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, Haight Ashbury, high net worth, holacracy, imposter syndrome, independent contractor, initial coin offering, job satisfaction, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Mitch Kapor, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, rent control, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, smart contracts, Steve Jobs, supercomputer in your pocket, tech billionaire, tech bro, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing complete, Uber for X, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, Vitalik Buterin

A Forbes article on May 22 by the crypto journalist Laura Shin included what I considered the understatement of the year: “The EEA new members include both financial services incumbents and blockchain startups, and span industries, including state government, health, and entertainment. The diversity of the members in terms of industry and age suggests the possibility for disruptive innovation.” (Emphasis mine) Crypto suddenly wasn’t so weird anymore. The old-timers couldn’t believe how quickly things had changed. Even Bitcoin veterans who’d been through the explosion of interest in Bitcoin in 2013 were shocked. ETH’s sweet smile kept lighting me up. On a break, I took a cab downtown to the Freedom Tower.

Notes From an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back by Mark O'Connell

Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, California gold rush, carbon footprint, Carrington event, clean water, Colonization of Mars, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Donner party, Easter island, Elon Musk, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, life extension, lock screen, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Society, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, off grid, Peter Thiel, post-work, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, the built environment, yield curve

These microbes relied exclusively on anaerobic methods of respiration—until one species, the cyanobacteria or blue-green algae, began to use the Sun’s light to generate vastly more energy than its anaerobic colleagues, by which method it thrived and increased its numbers exponentially, creating via the disruptive innovation of photosynthesis an exploding surplus of oxygen in the planet’s atmosphere, toxic to almost every other living thing on Earth. This one rogue microbe changed the atmospheric constitution of the Earth, causing the obliteration of most existing life on the planet and preparing the way for the evolution of multicellular organisms such as ourselves.

Firepower: How Weapons Shaped Warfare by Paul Lockhart

Charles Lindbergh, cotton gin, disruptive innovation, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, interchangeable parts, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Louis Blériot, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, retrograde motion, Scramble for Africa, technological determinism, three-masted sailing ship

Footnote 1 Simon Pepper and Nicholas Adams, Firearms and Fortifications: Military Architecture and Siege Warfare in Sixteenth-Century Siena (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 11. CHAPTER 2 THE SHIP-KILLING SHIP Artillery had proven itself to be the most useful—and the most disruptive—innovation in military technology in the history of the West thus far, even if only the wealthy and powerful could afford to take advantage of what it had to offer. If all it could do was to bash down castle walls, it would have been enough, but creative minds found other applications in short order.

…

Even as the dynastic states of post-Renaissance Europe were already in the throes of building large and complex bureaucracies, including vast military establishments, this did not translate to government involvement in weapons technology. Ordnance officers, such as there were, inventoried weapons but did not study them. Governments did not invest in weapons research, and neither did they encourage innovation. Innovation, like all change, was disruptive. Innovation was costly. But innovation happened anyway, if unlooked-for and by accident, and the matchlock gave way to a superior ignition system. This system, the most dramatic improvement in small arms technology from the introduction of gunpowder up to that point, was already known in Europe as early as the sixteenth century.

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future by Joi Ito, Jeff Howe

3D printing, air gap, Albert Michelson, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Burning Man, business logic, buy low sell high, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital rights, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, frictionless, game design, Gerolamo Cardano, informal economy, information security, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, move 37, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, Productivity paradox, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Singularitarianism, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Two Sigma, universal basic income, unpaid internship, uranium enrichment, urban planning, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

The culture of creative disobedience that draws innovators to Silicon Valley and the Media Lab is deeply threatening to hierarchical managers and many traditional organizations. However, those are the ones who most need to embrace it if they are to support their most creative workers and survive the coming age of disruption. Innovators who embody the principle of disobedience over compliance do not only increase their own creativity—they also inspire others to excellence. Since the 1970s, social scientists have recognized the positive impact of “positive deviants,” people whose unorthodox behavior improves their lives and has the potential to improve their communities if it’s adopted more widely.11 Over the past two and half decades, positive deviance has been used to combat malnutrition, hospital-acquired infections, female genital mutilation, and other health and social problems worldwide.12 It’s also been used by corporations to implement successful change programs that draw on the talents of positive deviants who are already in the company, rather than attempting to impose a new discipline from above—essentially allowing others to adopt the productive disobedience of their positive-deviant colleagues, rather than requiring them to comply with an outsiders’ rules, and enabling greater creativity and innovation in the process.13 In the industrialized, mass-production society of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, only a small number of people were supposed to be creative—the rest were simply expected to do as they were told.

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport

8-hour work day, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bluma Zeigarnik, business climate, Cal Newport, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, digital divide, disruptive innovation, do what you love, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, follow your passion, Frank Gehry, Hacker News, Higgs boson, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Merlin Mann, Nate Silver, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Nicholas Carr, popular electronics, power law, remote working, Richard Feynman, Ruby on Rails, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, statistical model, the medium is the message, Tyler Cowen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, winner-take-all economy, work culture , zero-sum game

At the same time, don’t lionize this quest for interaction and positive randomness to the point where it crowds out the unbroken concentration ultimately required to wring something useful out of the swirl of ideas all around us. Execute Like a Business The story has become lore in the world of business consulting. In the mid-1990s, Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen received a call from Andy Grove, the CEO and chairman of Intel. Grove had encountered Christensen’s research on disruptive innovation and asked him to fly out to California to discuss the theory’s implications for Intel. On arrival, Christensen walked through the basics of disruption: entrenched companies are often unexpectedly dethroned by start-ups that begin with cheap offerings at the low end of the market, but then, over time, improve their cheap products just enough to begin to steal high-end market share.

Our Robots, Ourselves: Robotics and the Myths of Autonomy by David A. Mindell

Air France Flight 447, air gap, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, autonomous vehicles, Beryl Markham, Boeing 747, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Lindbergh, Chris Urmson, digital map, disruptive innovation, driverless car, drone strike, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fudge factor, Gene Kranz, human-factors engineering, index card, John Markoff, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, telepresence, telerobotics, trade route, US Airways Flight 1549, William Langewiesche, zero-sum game

Ordinarily, this secretive outfit quietly took advanced, commercially available components and combined them into new systems for unique missions, usually building just a small number of any given platform. Big Safari was known for innovation, not bureaucratic skill at producing documents. It tried to normalize the program, often in conflict with the General Atomics engineers, who considered themselves disruptive innovators not answerable to military bureaucracy. The company had developed Predator largely with internal funds, so the engineers were reluctant to turn over data to the government for standardization. While some of the engineers were pilots, they tended to be from the general aviation world, flying small aircraft on weekends, rather than from the military, where aircraft needed close cooperation with larger systems.