Recently, a team consisting of MIT students, along with Pratt & Whitney and Aurora Flight Science Corporation announced a radical new design for a jetliner which would take about 1/4 the amount of fuel consumed by today’s planes.
The Bubble Jet
It made me wonder, what are the attributes of a breakthrough design? The Tesla electric car is an example, as was the original iPhone, the Sony Walkman and the Brooklyn Bridge. What do they share? Here’s my list of five things:
- Radical goals. Each was at least a 50% increase in performance (the bridge), decrease in size (the Walkman, or radically new design (the plane);
- Willingness to invent new core concepts. The Brooklyn Bridge invented a whole new kind of underwater excavation. The iPhone reinvented interface.
- A recognition of the desire for a better way — either as a creative exercise (Walkman, iPhone) or as a solution to a really difficult problem (Brooklyn Bridge and Bubble Plane).
- A brilliant team of engineers.
- A visionary leader. We know the ones for the iPhone, Brooklyn Bridge, and Walkman, and I’m sure one will surface for the bubble plane.
What are your candidates for innovations that broke the Paradigm? How did they do it?
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
John, I like your list of 5. What I wonder is what the sequence is? Does the leader come first then better way, then the radical goal, then the core concepts out of necessity, then the engineers to solve the problems? Or in some cases does the concept come first and the application of the concept 2nd.
I think most innovators think of the need first then look for the solution and these tend to have better results in the market. Others that start with cool concept then back into need may end up with a radical innovation (e.g. segway) but not much of a market. I’d be curious of your take on if there is a better sequence. thx
The question you raise about the sequence is very interesting. After the fact, it is easy to see which ideas were “too far out” and those that were “just right”. It’s like Goldilocks, but figuring out what is “just right” for the market is hard. One could have looked at the iPad before the fact — as many did — and say it would not be successful because it did not fill a need. It turned out the skeptics were wrong and Jobs was right.
In the case of the Segway, I think Dean Kamen was overoptimistic because in order for it to be adopted at the levels he expected, there would have had to be a systemic change in customer behavior across many physical and psychic categories — e.g. sidewalks are too small for Segways in many places, and roads too dangerous. There is no distribution or repair system for the Segways. There is no doubt in my mind that “system” innovation is harder than non-system innovation. So, maybe that’s one cut to separate the too far out from the just right.
I do think leadership and a willingness to be radical are prerequisites to paradigm breaking stuff, and they probably have to come first.
Evergreen topic, John.
Here is how I think about it:
#1–Radical Goals–Yes, bigger than the sun, so you cannot overlook them. And always adjusted, once achieved.
#2–Inventing continuously, as per #1 a necessity. So perhaps #2 is a (derivative) necessity for #1?
#3–If you do not recognize the necessity for innovation, then perhaps there will be no innovation, or will it happen anyway, indirectly enforced e.g.?
#4–Brilliant performers (engineers most realistically welcome), for sure, and the team should, from time to time, get reshuffled, for fresh blood/ideas, which brings us back to #2, and then #1.
#5–Visionary Leader(s)–Can there be just one? How about we take only folks in who can serve & lead, not just pretend to lead. This will keep their feet & heads on the ball. Some countries require intellectuals to do some physical work; some firms enforce every leader to do a part of the actual work of the projects they are involved in or have “the day for your own project” etc.
As for one of the most amazingly innovative products of its time: the Psion Handheld of 1990 (Psion 3, 3a, 3c, 3mx, 5, 5mx, etc). It had functionality, design, and efficiency that no mobile device today has. A shame, as all the parts are available, and in and by themselves the parts are better, but there is not the finessed fit & ergonomics. People need to use it, eat their own dog food, and honestly compare after “enjoying/suffering” a period of direct experience of the product. These days everyone wants to cram a computer into a phone, just like pressing an elephant into a mouse (and that does not even mention the functional restrictions). The other way around is the way to do it. In the Psion case you would stick a GSM PCMCIA card into the slot and you could manage all the phone functionality at ease and then some, without any loss on the computing side
1-3 and 5 seem like different ways of saying the same thing and #4 is the method of implementing the paradigm breaking idea. I think it’s more interesting to consider how to systematically create disruptive change that can define a new paradigm.
Typically people get trapped in “paradigms” to begin with because they don’t challenge the fundamental assumptions supporting the paradigm. Just the passage of time and new innovations/technologies should cause one to periodically re-assess assumptions as new possibilities are always emerging. A great exercise for any business leader or management team would be to identify the biggest “assumptions” about the industry in which they operate and play the “what if” game. Identifying the lynchpin issues that could cause an industry to be redefined can then lead to an exploration of whether there are radical ways of achieving a breakthrough.
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