Clayton Christensen on competing against non-consumption
From an email I got today about Harvard Business School Professor and author of the The Innovator's Dilemma and The Innovator's Solution Clayton Christensen and his "competing against non-consumption" thesis.
One example Clayton gives is Sony and the transistor radio. The product was not good enough for anyone who could afford a table-top tube radio. But teenagers embraced it because their option was no radio at all.
Clayton explains his litmus test: "Does it compete against non-consumption? Does it target customers that are delighted to have a crummy [good enough] product? Does it help customers do something they wanted to do but didn't have the means for or is it predicated on wanting to get something done that consumers haven't prioritized?" This all works well for the aspiring disrupter, but how does an established business know it is likely to be squeezed by disruptive technology [like Microsoft]? "It's simple," explained Dr. Christensen. Ask: "Who isn't buying your product [e.g., developing markets, software pirates, most of the 600 million plus cell phones sold this year]?"
This is a brilliant characterization of the right way to think about brand new products, including those using speech recognition. Of course, the obvious place to find users delighted to have crummy recognition is in areas like:
- Accessibility: those suffering from repetitive stress disorder or other handicaps that prevent use of a keyboard.
- Mobility: inside a car or in another situation where you can't use your hands.
- Size: a device that is too small to handle a keyboard.
In each case, users are happy to pay extra -- and suffer less-than-perfect reco -- for a solution. The key is to keep looking for your real competition: the option to not consume your product at all.
