Entrepreneurs: Disrupting Complexity
by Miki Saxon
Entrepreneurs love to talk about disrupting.
Most recently they have been disrupting finance.
Harvard’s Jim Heskett posits the idea that tech itself is ripe for disruption, especially if you agree with Clayton M. Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma.
Tech is ungainly for many of us.
Too much of it is developed by the young for the young
Both hardware and software are built by techies in love with the bleeding edge for early adopters and people captivated by potential — whether they will ever have use for it is incidental.
We’re told that the typical user of information technology today utilizes less than 5 percent of the capability made available by today’s hardware and software. A small number of basic functions repeatedly are put to good use by the typical user. They are the need-to-have functions. The functions thought by designers to be nice to have may enhance marketing efforts and satisfy software engineers’ desires to make complex things, but they largely go unused. For some, they even make access to “need to have” functions more confusing.
While many companies add (expensive) bells and whistles to drive growth, others work to provide a more minimalist approach that crushes competitors.
Heskett uses Intuit as an example of a company that focuses on consistently making its software simpler.
It did it by providing simple and inexpensive solutions to everyday problems. Scott [Cook, Intuit co-founder] likes to say that Intuit had 47th mover advantage, in part because it adopted a strategy that identified the pencil as the company’s most important competitor.
Does Heskett’s idea have legs? Is tech, in fact, ripe for Intuit-quality disruption?
If you have strong feelings or thoughts on the subject be sure to add your thoughts to the open forum; Even if you don’t comment it’s worth following; Heskett’s ideas always draw eclectic, well thought-through responses from his audience.
Image credit: Harvard Business School
