6.1. The chasm

The way to enter new markets reveals the style of leadership to come for the products at stake.

First mover or second mover? Advantages versus disadvantages. The one who moves ahead first on new markets takes all the burden. The price to pay for maximum freedom and, later, dominance. Followers need to differentiate themselves, or alternatively accept to be perceived as “me-too” players. How do we mitigate a dilemma?

6.2. Amplifying the gap and progressing

So, to return again Apple entering other unexpected markets. For instance, what about the automobile market? But look again, the automobile can be considered as a special instance of a mobile equipment. That mobile could be versatile enough to be used, at will, perhaps as an office, and not solely as a transportation mean for leisure or business purpose. And it may not even require a driver!

Various speculations can be made on how Apple may in the future combine, in a radically new way, existing products categories. Best exemple is Steve Jobs, in his famous 2007 presentation, announcing “three revolutionary devices”: a wide screen iPod, a mobile Phone, and an internet communicator… which ultimately turned out to be a single device: the iPhone.

Is this future or present? When do we use the future tense and the present tense? Innovating is about thinking now what others will see tomorrow. So, why do we use the future tense? To resolve the gap, which is a source of unresolvable anxiety for markets, move the camera out of sight: do not talk about your future products. Second, you do not know the exact path to market: timing and other issues always impede the linear approach. Think of the “infinite loops” announcements by companies (perhaps Microsoft?) and remove the need to have to later argument about changes in strategy.

There is arguably a stock of rationale in this. First, your energy is limited. Keep your energy like a monk does. Do you want to fragment it by managing the response to your visions of the future? This would lead you entertaining a whole discussion with ever would-be customers.

In a nutshell, it is not the objective that is meaningful, it is the end. Leonardo Da Vinci: “always keep the end in sight”.

The promising market potential of good ideas may frequently be ruined by poor timing.

When innovating, keeping objectives fixed and stable is, by definition, impossible. But not having the end in sight is behaving like a weather vane. The end becomes your focus: it keeps you tight and safe against (trade, tempting directions, etc.) winds. It may well be that the target remains out of reach; still, it provides a compass for navigating your innovation.

Project management is completely overhauled when you do innovation. You cannot simply manage by objectives since you do not know them yet. A priori given objectives reveal obstacles which you may want to avoid. The management purpose is to create the conditions for staff to move with force (internalized for people). Add resilience to your vision and do not confuse resilience with sustainability.

Under the dissolving agency of digital age technologies, categories blur nowadays, and new groups are formed from old divisions, which were not previously seen as approved and controlled nomenclatures.

We commonly tend to take the existing classifications for granted. But, what about the traditional taxi business at an age when self-driving cars come to the road in numbers? It is not Netscape that came to dominate a rejuvenated music business, but it was Netscape that breached the wall of closed music listening for the teenagers once for all in the 1990s. The price to pay was huge both for the sustainability of Netscape and some young, heavy music listeners (or, better, their parents). But, the damage caused to the traditional music business ecosystem was irreversible. If you reinvent, not the automobile, but personal transportation, by dematerializing ownership of cars and build applications operated from platforms, then you instantaneously own the usufruct of all the cars in the world by federating a huge ecosystem of players, without having to pay anything for their maintenance, minus the usage.

Apple’s past track record of innovating shows that no product category can be immune to alteration, therefore excluded from innovation strategies. Yet, the only requirement may be that the new target market must be strategically expressed in B$, or better in tens of B$, for one chief reason: as it happened in oil business, then in pharmaceutics long ago, this is now the elementary accounting unit for Apple.