A lot of Alice in Wonderland this week.
During this episode, Mr. Shomit Ghose of ONSET Ventures outlines the difference between marginal and disruptive innovation. We also talk about the embodiment of the Red Queen Hypothesis and the OODA loop in today’s competitive business climate where companies are expected to innovate quickly in order to stay ahead of their competition.
The Cognitive Crucible Episode #36 Ghose on Disruptive Innovation, Amazoogle, and Entrepreneurship
A good, short episode from CC. Here’s the Red Queen Hypothesis from Ghose’s paper:
The Red Queen Hypothesis was put forward by University of Chicago biologist Leigh Van Valen in his seminal 1973 paper on “A New Evolutionary Law”. In this hypothesis, Van Valen posited that organisms must constantly adapt and evolve because they live in an ever-evolving ecosystem, competing for survival against other ever-evolving organisms. Everything is competitive, and nothing is constant; it’s explicitly a zero-sum game, and stasis means extinction. Just as in the Red Queen’s quote to Alice in Through the Looking-Glass.
In business, the Red Queen says that it’s not enough that your company is running as fast as possible, you need to run fast relative to your competition. With data-driven Amazoogle business models moving at breakneck speeds, how fast is your company running? If you’re not positioning yourself to out-Amazoogle your Amazoogle competition, then you’re positioned for irrelevance at best and extinction at worst.
The Red Queen and the Inevitability of the Amazoogle Business Model
What is the competition, and what are they doing?
It’s not always going to be possible to beat the competition – they might be bigger, faster, more lethal – or maybe they play by a different set of rules.
If you can’t outcompete them with raw power, then you have to turn to innovation.
I appreciate this quote from the article.
“The railroads are in trouble today not because the need was filled by others (cars, trucks, airplanes, even telephones), but because it was not filled by the railroads themselves. They let others take customers away from them because they assumed themselves to be in the railroad business rather than in the transportation business. The reason they defined their industry wrong was because they were railroad-oriented instead of transportation-oriented; they were product oriented instead of customer-oriented.”
Theodore Levitt, “Marketing Myopia”, Harvard Business Review, July-August 1960
A narrow focus on the thing you do versus the field you’re in will eventually stifle you. Something – or someone – is going to figure it out. Unfortunately, many of us (myself included) tend to get focused on the important skills that got us to where we are. We’re good at them. They are tried and true – if I can just squeeze a little bit more out, I can get better.
That will work, to a point. Then it’s time to get disruptive.
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Carrying the Gun 