Folding Plug System: redesigning the UK 3-pin plug
"'Mac book Air,' Apple's latest master-piece, is the world's thinnest laptop ever. However, here in the U.K, we still use the world's biggest three-pin plug. Most people carry laptops with adapters and plugs because laptop batteries have limitations on the time they can be used. When people carry laptops with U.K plugs in a bag, it always causes problems such as tearing paper, scratching laptop surfaces and, sometimes, it breaks other stuff. The main problem is the UK standard 3-pin plug is not considered in the process of designing for mobility. My intention of the project was directed to make the plug as slim as possible and follow the British Standard regulation at the same time."
(Min-Kyu Choi, 20 April 2009)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Disruptive versus Radical Innovations
"The innovator's dilemma is this: a company that does everything by the book - listening to customers, managing by facts, being disciplined about costs and quality, and so forth - can get blindsided by an innovation that rapidly takes away its markets, because it was doing everything right. The innovations that cause this 'why bad things happen to good companies' dilemma are disruptive innovations. The signature story of disruption reads as follows: an upstart low-end competitor displaces a much larger incumbent in a market, with the incumbent either retreating upmarket to higher margin/lower volume products or dying out altogether. ...
Examples are smaller, cheaper hard drives disrupting incumbent hard drive makers, hydraulic shovels disrupting cable-winch shovels (an early 20th century example), PCs disrupting mainframes, ink jet printers disrupting laser printers and, most recently, the Nintendo Wii starting to disrupt the Playstation and the Xbox.
Major though they were, innovations such as CDs, laser printing and jet airplane engines were not disruptive with respect to the technologies they displaced ( cassette tapes, light lens Xerography and piston engines respectively). In each case, the incumbents benefited from these non-disruptive, or sustaining innovations.
The key point to remember is that disruption is a market/business phenomenon and has little to do with technology per se. In particular, a disruptive innovation may or may not represent a major technical breakthrough. Major breakthroughs, which are called ‘radical' in Christenson's model, may or may not be disruptive, while minor, or ‘incremental' innovations can be massively disruptive. The opposite of disruptive is sustaining. Why and how does disruption happen?
A disruptive innovation usually starts as a low-quality differentiated product in a low-volume marginal segment of a much larger mature market, which demands attributes that the mainstream market does not, and which is willing to give up performance attributes the mainstream market is not (example, Wii customers willing to give up sheer processing horsepower for 3d input capability).
A marginal player occupies this segment and starts growing rapidly, solving initial quality problems while retaining a cost advantage.
The incumbent mature market leader, no matter how visionary, is forced to ignore the opportunity because it does not meet the growth needs dictated by its larger size, and also because the disruptive product is not yet good enough for its mainstream customers.
The marginal player goes through a learning curve, solves its quality problems and suddenly starts threatening the market leader in its main markets
The incumbent scrambles to put together a response, nearly always fails because of the disruptor's head start and optimized culture, and retreats to a higher-end market."
(Venkatesh Rao, 23 July 2007)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
How Unilever, Coke and the Mini car got it so wrong
"Even the biggest businesses can make big mistakes - and when they do, the result can be a commercial calamity. Companies are constantly striving to improve their products and turn a profit. But changing an existing product can go horribly wrong, leaving customers in revolt and companies in crisis. Mishandled marketing and bungling public relations can make the slickest of businesses look incompetent. And the costs both financially and to reputation can be enormous. Persil, Coca-Cola and the British Motor Corporation have provided some of the most extreme examples as Evan Davis has been finding out for a new BBC Two series."
(BBC News, 8 May 2011)
Business Nightmares with Evan Davis - Doomed Designs will be on BBC Two at 20:00 BST on Monday 9 May 2011
Fig.1 '2009 Mini Cooper Turns Fifty and is Younger than Ever', picture 09ELG550925430AC
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Sony NEX-5K: an exceptionally small yet powerful hybrid camera
"Sony has designed and built an exceptionally small yet powerful hybrid camera which delivers image quality to match a digital SLR’s, combined with full HD movies, the excellent Sweep Panorama mode (with a 3D firmware upgrade coming soon), high-speed shooting and more. It’s a great little camera"
(Marcus Hawkins 25th August 2010, PhotoRadar)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
PlaySport: naming by consensus
"For those companies willing to make the cultural commitment to the instantaneous praise and bashing served up 140 characters at a time on Twitter, the rewards can be considerable.
Jeffrey Hayzlett, Kodak's chief marketing officer, said that he learned firsthand after the company originally debuted its Zi8 waterproof, pocket-sized HD video camera earlier this year. ...
Most companies would either ignore the panning or, perhaps, send the product back to the sales and marketing gurus to come up with a better name.
Kodak didn't. Instead, this summer it took the naming process to the people via Twitter, asking the great unwashed masses on the microblogging site to see if they could come up with something better. The winner, or winners as it turns out, were promised a free trip to Vegas for this year's CES and will have their likeness displayed in some way on the product's packaging.
From the thousands of tweets received from the crowdsourcing experiment, Kodak combined two fairly mundane suggestions -- 'Play' and 'Sport' -- to derive the new moniker 'PlaySport.' It's not rocket science but, according to Hayzlett, it's a damn sight better than Zi8."
(Larry Barrett, 7 January 2010)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
