Chapter 3
Benefits of Disaggregation: The Revolutionary’s Bill of Rights

Chapter 2 explained how to analyze an innovation: how it disaggregates, what it disaggregates, how it works, and what basic human desires it fulfills. In this chapter, I’m going to discuss another important matter: what benefits to expect from an innovation. The universal benefits of disaggregation are:

• Creativity
• Competition
• Cost Reduction
• Simplicity
• Specialization
• Synergy

I call them “universal” benefits because they show up, consistently, whenever an innovation works by disaggregation; every example and every case study in this book demonstrates at least some of these benefits. If you’re a revolutionary—if you’re working hard on innovations that disaggregate—then this list is your bill of rights. Your innovation should bring you at least some of these benefits, and possibly all of them.22

Creativity

When disaggregation triggers an avalanche, it’s not gravity that pulls on the rocks and gets them moving. It’s creativity, pushing from behind, that sends the avalanche roaring down the side of the mountain. Creativity is the force behind the avalanche—creativity, as it finally escapes from behind the rocks that were holding it back.

What holds creativity back? Of course, there are lots of ways to prevent people from being creative, and probably a thousand books that explain how to free people’s creativity, but I’ll give my short version: creativity is stifled by authority, or is simply stopped in its tracks when people cannot figure out how to share. Disaggregation tears down these barriers and gives creativity a chance to escape.

And, of course, disaggregation increases the number of fascinating new and shiny pebbles for people to tinker with. If there’s one thing that creative people enjoy, it’s a new collection of pebbles.

Competition

After an avalanche smashes through the old forest, a new forest starts to grow. The new shape of the land lets plants grow where they couldn’t grow before, the old trees that once choked out younger trees have fallen, and open spaces let seeds from far away take root and thrive.

Disaggregation sweeps aside the old infrastructure and changes the technological landscape. Companies that were once dominant can’t keep newcomers away, innovation creates new niches and new ways to provide the technology, and people use the open space and breathing room to build new companies.

Cost Reduction23

Disaggregation reduces costs—both the cost to manufacture and the cost to purchase. The way disaggregation reduces costs is usually straightforward. In the case of mechanical disaggregation, an innovation lowers manufacturing costs when a new design has fewer parts or when the parts become easier to manufacture.

When I analyze an innovation, I step back from time to time and take the broadest possible view of cost reduction. Voice mail is a good example of how an innovation saves more than money. If someone calls me and I have voice mail available, then the person saves time by leaving a message instead of calling back time and again to try and catch me. The caller also saves time because talking to voice mail is usually much faster than dictating a message to a secretary, and much more thorough, too. As for me, the receiver, I save time because I can hear all the details from the voice message, and I also save money because I don’t have to hire a secretary. When voice mail first became popular, I used to hear complaints from people who didn’t want to “talk to a machine,” but today I hear complaints when there isn’t a machine to talk to—because now people appreciate how the innovation reduces costs in their lives.

Simplicity

Once you’ve taken things apart, the pieces left behind—the pebbles—are simpler.

I’m not saying that this benefit, simplicity, necessarily makes life easier in the short term. When disaggregation changes one widget into ten new widgets, it’s hard to juggle all the pieces and get them to work together. Fortunately, each new widget is generally simpler, and that’s a measurable benefit: simpler to operate, simpler to improve, and simpler to repair. In technology, simplicity is a virtue, and disaggregation makes it possible.

Specialization

If you ever need to see a hundred or so examples of disaggregation, wander over to your local university library. Go the periodicals room, pick up a dozen or so trade journals from various industries, and start reading the advertisements. Each industry hatches dozens of highly specialized subindustries. Here are a few examples: a company that makes custom labels for wires to go inside electronic equipment; a service that screens potential call-center employees for their customer skills; a company in the publishing industry that checks computer files to make certain they’ll print correctly.24

The reason for all this specialization is quite rational: once disaggregation creates new pieces of technology, it’s only natural that people decide to become experts in how the new pieces work. The converse is also true: people decide to become experts on some small corner of the technology, hang out a shingle, and before long another piece of the technology is disaggregated as experts compete against each other to reduce costs and improve service.

Synergy

After disaggregation, I’ve got a nice collection of pebbles. After an additional disaggregation, one that is perhaps in an entirely different field of business or technology, I’ve got yet another nice collection of pebbles. Synergy happens when I use pebbles from these different collections to create new products.

Here’s a high-tech example of mixing pebbles from two different fields. The movie industry invented digital compression for music, and the computer industry invented wireless technology to let computers connect to networks without cables (another disaggregation). Put the two together, stir in a few audio components, and out comes a new product for home stereo systems: a little box that connects to the stereo through the usual cables and to a home computer through the wireless network. Whatever can be played on a home computer—and some people have quite a collection of online music—will play through the living room stereo.

Let’s review the basic process of analysis, as presented in this chapter and the previous one. To evaluate an innovation, in addition to the analysis explained in Chapter 2, I run through the list of universal benefits and decide which of the benefits the innovation is likely to generate. For whichever benefits are likely, I provide a detailed description of the benefit(s).25

A complete analysis of an innovation includes

• Sorting the innovation into proper categories
• Answering the basic operational questions about how the innovation will work
• Assessing the revolutionary potential of the innovation, including its likely scope
• Deciding what benefits are likely from this innovation

In the next chapter, we’ll look at the opposite process: if you have a problem, how can you come up with an innovation to solve it?