In yet another Daring Fireball-inspired tract, Charlie Wood asks why Apple appears to escape the "innovator’s dilemma" presented in Clayton Christensen’s eponymous work. The idea is a follow-on from Christensen’s earlier depiction of ‘disruptive technology-cum-innovations’ and how they evolve within a market (similar to Kuhn’s structure of scientific revolutions). Once the disruptive paradigm has established a beachhead, its progenitor often overdoes its development and in turn loses out to second-tier players that leapfrog it by adopting the innovation at a ‘good enough’ level, undercutting the market leader. Yet Apple, at least in its current incarnation, seems to avoid that pitfall.

Moonwatcher: Why Doesn’t Apple Face The Innovator’s Dilemma?

Wood argues that this is in due to Apple distinguishing itself by design, which appeals to taste and is harder to usurp than a typical feature matrix. This certainly helps explain why, for example, the iPod has utterly eclipsed any imitators (which add features at the expense of usability) and why the iPhone was able to dominate mindshare so quickly in an established smartphone segment (which has always buried functionality behind clunky interfaces).

However, another straightforward business answer is that Apple acts to undercut itself rather than leaving that to a competitor. For example, when the iPod Mini was the bestselling flash-based music player, they discontinued it and introduced the Nano, which reconsidered the Mini in both design and features rather than just making minor changes. With the iPhone less than a year old, already intense speculation mounts about a likely successor with enhancements like 3G wireless, effectively hamstringing competition which may already have 3G-capable handsets. To re-iterate: even the rumor of a future iPhone feature is somehow perceived (at least in the breathless press coverage) as superior to other brands already in the field.

Perhaps even more apt than Wood’s own rationalization is the observation made in a comment by Martin Pilkington that:

"the problem with most companies once they become larger is

a) they become more bureaucratic
b) everyone starts to protect their own territory
c) marketing takes over or they ignore marketing"

This you may recognize as a business-specific case of systemantics, where the business effectively ends up at war with itself in unconscious internecine competition for resources. He also adds the specific point—which has also been espoused by Steve Jobs in interviews about the Apple design philosophy—that they do not add features to products merely to reach feature parity in reaction to competition, or through typical focus group artificiality, but through something more akin to user cases. That is, they imagine how people want to use a device, and then build a feature to make that possible in as intuitive a way as possible. As far back as 1998 (when their resurgent success was much less assured), Jobs told BusinessWeek that:

"It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them."

Is there a better shorthand for product innovation than ‘thinking of what people want before they knew they wanted it’? 

Wrapping up today’s trifecta of psychological judo, Brad Bird discusses lessons on encouraging innovation he applied at Pixar, as well as what institutional enablers the company offers:

Pixar’s Brad Bird on Fostering Innovation

GigaOM extracts his interview with the McKinsey Quarterly into 9 lessons. While all make for interesting insights into creative teambuilding, perhaps the most universal is morale as multiplier:

“If you have low morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about $3 of value.”

Although occasionally given mention, it’s still uncommon to hear morale recognized so starkly as a driver of value. Compare, for example, the divergent way in which Wal-Mart and CostCo treat their employees. ‘Cost’ as measured strictly on the balance sheet does not factor in lost productivity due to malaise or innate rebellion resulting from poor employee morale.

The availability of interdisciplinary learning via Pixar University also offers an antidote to the two previous articles’ recognition of skill calcification. One interesting aside about the company offering Krav Maga as a class alongside storytelling and improvisation is that, in contrast to most other fighting styles, KM is built much more around principles instead of techniques. Students are trained for real-world contingencies, and great emphasis is placed on conditioning the student to react instictively against an attack and escape versus get caught in a traditional ‘battle’ as found in other styles. Thus, Krav Maga could be seen as much as psychological adaptation as physical defense.

Finally, the influence of Steve Jobs is evident in the overall layout of the campus, such as a central atrium to maximize crossover contact between functional teams as they visit the cafeteria or even the bathrooms. One other example of cross-disciplinary inspiration comes from today’s Fortune story “Apple and Eve” about the role of chief Apple designer Jonathan Ive in affirming the character of Eve from the upcoming Pixar film Wall-E. What caught my attention more than even the premise of a character based on Apple projected into the 28th century is the limits placed on Ive’s involvement:

“Apple is so proprietary and so secretive that he couldn’t even really allude to where the future of technology was going,” says Stanton. “The most he could do is nod his head to the things we said we wanted to do.”

Whether this reticence was at Ive’s own initiative or reinforced by the looming ire of Jobs and lawyers et al., it reminds me of how straitjacketed corporate culture can become—’corporate’ here referring to almost any size company whose investments of intellectual property and shareholder value demand these precautions of silence and measured response. Even the tiny startup Epiphyte in Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon has to employ elaborate security to protect their corporate interests.

One of the small joys of introspection is identifying those cognitive traps that restrict our growth. This ego-spelunking process has featured prominently in Western philosophy within the role of the skeptic (e.g. Descartes); in Eastern disciplines such as Buddhism; and in various self-help tomes that provide a mash-up of both (e.g. Dan Millman’s Way of the Peaceful Warrior). In laying out the idiosyncratic ‘metaphysics of Quality’ in his Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig proposes a related concept called the ‘gumption trap’ which siphons off your enthusiasm when you encounter “affective, cognitive and psychomotor blocks” in performing a task.

Reginald Braithwaite discusses what might be characterized as one of these self-limiting habits:

Why we are the biggest obstacles to our own growth

This begins by riffing on an observation made by Daring Fireball’s John Gruber in analyzing the import of the mainstream success of Apple among youth, which has now filtered down from the obvious case to financial analysis. Braithwaite carries the idea in a more professional direction, namely that what you know often interferes with your acceptance of something you don’t. Building up a degree of expertise in any discipline means you have potentially more to lose – in comfort and initial efficiency at least – when switching to a novel alternative. Braithwaite’s examples are specific to software programming (Lisp vs Factor, regular expressions in Ruby) but the principle can be applied more broadly. The effects can be seen in resistance to new technologies or methodologies, resulting in foot-dragging up through overt sabotage reminescent of Luddites.

The solution at the individual level is to learn how to stretch, just as you do to extend physical reach. This can mean challenging long-accepted notions on technique that may no longer be the pinnacle solutions they once were, particularly when crossing disciplines—keeping with the software design idea, , for example, when switching from procedural to object-oriented programming. At the group level, extra attention should be paid to transitional aids and training to help lower the resistance borne out of knee-jerk anxiety triggered by a perceived threat to one’s identity.

[EB: Luddite]