Chapter Two
Starting Revolutions: What to Take Apart

Disaggregation goes beyond simply taking things apart, and this chapter explains the details—how disaggregation works, what it does, and how to decide whether a particular innovation is important.

This chapter follows the same general outline I’d use to write up an analysis of an innovation. It’s modified, of course—instead of discussing just one innovation, I’ve included some examples, and I’ve added all sorts of explanations. Still, if you want to analyze an innovation, write your own version of this chapter and you’ll cover all the important points. (You’ll need to read the next chapter, too.)

Here are the steps to analyze an innovation:

Step 1: Sort the Innovation

What is it, exactly, that the innovation disaggregates?

Step 2: Answer the Basic Questions

How does the innovation work?

Step 3: Assess the Revolutionary Potential

Based on the information from Steps 1 and 2, is this a revolutionary innovation?

In the next few sections, we’ll discuss the details of how to analyze an innovation.

Step 1. Sort the Innovation

Someone hands you an innovation, and you think it works by disaggregation. Here’s a question you need to answer: what is it—exactly—that’s being disaggregated?

The what of disaggregation falls into five general categories. Innovations can disaggregate:

• Authority
• Ownership
• Mechanics
• Space/Time
• Concepts

Categories help suggest improvements. If we’re trying to improve an innovation and make it more useful, we can ask questions like, “This innovation only disaggregates in category X. Can it disaggregate in category Y, too?”

Authority

Authority refers to the ability to determine what happens. If I manage something, if I control how it’s made or what it does, if I decide how much it costs, if I control when something happens or if it happens at all, then I have authority. Authority can belong to a single person or to a group: a company, an industry, or a government, to name a few.

One important reason to disaggregate authority is to increase trust. A typical case is when manufacturers agree to follow some set of rules or an industry standard; they break off a piece of their authority and hand it over to third party, and in return they gain their customers’ trust.

Another way to increase trust is to disaggregate authority and disperse it widely—to give authority to all participants. Sometimes disaggregation of authority is not about trust; authority becomes widely dispersed or simply evaporates, and the result is that people have more autonomy and freedom.11

Table 2.1 shows an example of an innovation that disaggregates authority and increases trust.

Table 2.1: Authority

Ownership

Ownership has two meanings. The first meaning is the legal definition that refers to all the kinds of ownership that range from owning a shirt to owning stock market shares of a shirt factory. The other meaning of ownership is the one from the colloquial expression, where we say that some entity or some persons “own” something because they have a monopoly over it or possess it informally. For example, “Acme Corporation owns the market for computer memory chips.”

An innovation that disaggregates ownership breaks the link between people and what they own. Usually the innovation will transfer ownership and it goes from one party to a different party. But there are times when disaggregation will make ownership just plain disappear—either whatever was owned disappears (for example, the market share vanishes), or it’s still around but no one owns it. In more unusual cases, disaggregation forces a change in the meaning of ownership by changing the actual legal definition.12

When disaggregation of ownership gives many people a stake in what’s been shared, we often see a powerful result: more sharing. The more widely something is shared, the more people contribute. No one—or better yet, everyone—owns the World Wide Web, and millions of people spend time and money to put up informative Web pages just for the sheer joy of sharing.

Table 2.2 shows an example of disaggregation of ownership.

Table 2.2: Ownership

Mechanics13

Disaggregations in this category modify a mechanical relationship. What do I mean by the terms mechanical and relationship?

Let’s say we’re trying to build a better mousetrap. Mechanical refers to the physical properties of the mousetrap: the material that the mousetrap is made of, how it’s put together, and any electrical characteristics. Mechanical also includes software, which is just as real as the nuts and bolts that hold the mousetrap together.

The word relationship refers to links, associations, and connections. Disaggregation doesn’t need to split the mousetrap apart or do something to the mousetrap itself. Instead, the innovation can break the association between the mousetrap and some other object, like a specialized mousetrap-building machine. A disaggregation that breaks a “mechanical relationship” falls into the category of mechanical disaggregation.

Creative people like to tinker, and mechanical disaggregation often provides some very interesting “pebbles” to tinker with. After disaggregation, the pieces of technology are generally smaller, less complex, and more flexible than what was available before—and that’s a winning combination when someone wants to be creative.

Table 2.3 shows an example of mechanical disaggregation.

Space/time

Innovations in this category take an event and break its connection to a particular place or time.

Innovations in this category are absolutely spectacular when they are aimed at people—at human events and the human senses. Over the past hundred years, disaggregation of some of the human senses—speech, sight, and hearing—completely transformed society.

Here’s an ancient example: the art of writing. Writing lets people transmit their ideas to one another without the need to meet in person.

Disaggregations in this category produce two common results, which we’ll see in many examples. The first is convenience: it’s very handy to move events around in time and space, and many of today’s most successful innovations provide that capability. The second common result is community: people use the ability to communicate with each other across distances and across generations to form communities.14

Table 2.3: Mechanics

Table 2.4 shows an example of the disaggregation of space/time.

Concepts

Sometimes an innovation takes apart a concept—a relationship that exists in people’s minds. Concepts are more than just abstractions: our lives, our societies, and our institutions are built around certain ideas of how the world works. When a new innovation comes along and changes how we think, society also changes.

Conceptual disaggregation is at its best when it removes limits on how we think about problems. Creative innovations appear when preconceptions disappear.

Table 2.5 gives an example of conceptual disaggregation.

Table 2.4: Space/time

Table 2.5: Concepts

Step 2: Answer the Basic Questions16

Now that we’ve defined all the categories, it’s time to think about how disaggregation works. Here’s the list of basic operational questions:

• Is disaggregation voluntary or involuntary?
• What is the scope of the disaggregation?
• Is the innovation technical, social, or a combination of both?
• What will happen to the pieces afterward?

If you’re doing an analysis of an innovation, you’ll want to ask all these questions over and again for each category. That’s because the answers might be different in each category; for example, what happens to the pieces after disaggregation in one category isn’t the same as what happens in a different category.

I’m going to discuss each of these questions.

Is Disaggregation Voluntary or Involuntary?

The question has a few different meanings. In the case of disaggregation of authority or of ownership, it’s pretty straightforward: will the people who have authority or control surrender it because they want to, or because they have to? Sometimes people cheerfully surrender market share or authority; see Chapter 8. Other times they fight tooth and nail.

In the case of mechanics, the question usually is whether people will voluntarily adopt the innovation or not. After all, some people just hated the whole idea of the automobile.

In the case of space/time or concepts, again the same holds true. Sometimes people will cheerfully adopt the innovation. Other times they won’t—I remember executives who demanded that all their e-mail be printed out and who never went online.

Just remember, not everyone will greet your new idea with a smile. This book is about avalanches, revolutions that change everything, and that means that some people will fight against change. It doesn’t make a difference whether they lose anything—they just don’t want the change.

What Is the Scope of the Disaggregation?

How far does the disaggregation go? Is it a full and complete dis-aggregation, or a partial disaggregation?

For example, when the government takes away authority, they rarely take it all away. The U.S. government has rules and regulations about safety, but companies have their own rules and regulations. Some of their authority is gone, but not all of it.17

In other cases, the disaggregation is complete. When the government broke up AT&T, AT&T lost all ownership rights in the local telephone companies. Mechanical disaggregation—which includes taking apart relationships—also can be quite complete.

Is the Innovation Technical, Social, or a Combination of Both?

Although it’s tempting to think that social innovations (business decisions, rules, regulations, laws, and court rulings) cause disaggregation of authority and that technical innovations cause mechanical disaggregation, it’s not that straightforward.

Technical innovation can cause companies to lose ownership. A good example is that of the music companies; in the late 1990s, they effectively lost ownership of their product because of downloading via the Internet. Only later did the music companies really start to come up with sensible business models to adjust to the new technologies.

Social innovations can drive a mechanical disaggregation. For example, antitrust laws can force companies to redesign their products into smaller pieces, which allows competitors to provide some of those pieces.

What Will Happen to the Pieces Afterward?

If you take something apart, what’s left behind? When AT&T came apart, all the pieces were left behind—after all, people still needed to make telephone calls.

Sometimes an innovation will take things apart but leave nothing behind. Ownership vanishes entirely when an artist puts a piece of art into the public domain. Mechanical disaggregation sometimes leads to more parts; but then again, a new design will often eliminate some parts—no single rule covers all possible innovations.

Step 3: Assess the Revolutionary Potential

Now it’s time to step back a bit and look at the innovation as a whole. Maybe I’m convinced this is a good, solid, worthwhile innovation. But is it revolutionary? Will it trigger an unstoppable avalanche? Is there any way to predict in advance? What makes an innovation revolutionary?18

The analysis so far—sorting into categories and answering the basic questions—provides a way to let me predict whether an innovation is truly revolutionary. Well, more accurately, to help predict, because I still need to exercise some judgment.

Here are a few rules that help predict revolutionary potential:

• If an innovation disaggregates in multiple categories, it’s more likely to touch off an avalanche.
• Innovations that produce multiple disaggregations—even in a single category—are more likely to start a revolution.
• An innovation that effectively provides for some basic human desire, or an innovation that performs a unique disaggregation in a particular category, is more likely to start a revolution.

We’ll run across examples of all these situations in the rest of the book. As for what the “basic human desires” are, I include at a minimum the desire to share, the desire to form communities, and the desire for convenience—the desire to “make life easier.”

The automatic teller machine, the ATM, is a nice, familiar, revolutionary innovation. Table 2.6 shows a quick analysis of the ATM.

The ATM does fit a couple of the rules. First, ATMs disaggregate in multiple categories; second, the ATM fulfills a basic human desire, convenience. Our analysis shows the ATM could be revolutionary, and so it was in practice.

I want to point out a bias in this book. Most of the examples I use are (I hope) pretty familiar to everyone. That means that whenever I bring up a revolution, I usually talk about one that everyone has heard of, a really big revolution that affects all of society. That’s the bias—the idea that all revolutions are earth-shattering. What I want to point out is that a revolution can happen just in a particular field but still be revolutionary.

Not all revolutions are created equal. Sometimes an innovation will revolutionize an industry, but that doesn’t mean that the innovation will change everyone’s lives, or even that anyone outside the business will notice that it happened. Earth-shattering innovations don’t come along every day. A revolution might affect “only” an industry, or a single business, or a single department, or a single individual—but a small-scale revolution is still worthwhile.19

Table 2.6: Analysis of Automatic Teller Machines