Red Queen Effect 2

Dave Bayless has responded to Critiques of the Red Queen Model, including my comments on this blog (Red Queen Effect, see also Rates of Evolution). 

Dave chooses to define innovation as "launching new products". Both John Hagel and I believe that there are other kinds of innovation that are important. But I have a more fundamental concern with Dave's definition - if I don't know exactly what counts as a "new product", then I don't know how to count them. If this year's model has a slightly faster chip than last year's model, or a brushed aluminium case, does that count as a "new product"? Let's say the iPod is a new product, but is the iPhone really a new product, or just a fancy redesign of an old product?

Lots of people in product development have a vested interest in labelling everything as "new improved". Pharma companies spend a small fortune looking for variations on existing drugs, so they can get patent protection for the "new" formula. But if you take these descriptions at face value, you get a fundamentally distorted view of the underlying technology change.

This is why I think we need a rigorous model of technology change, which handles some of the complications I raise in my previous blog entries.

 

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Update March 2022

Following a brief exchange with Dave on Linked-In, I have looked at another of his earlier posts, which refers to the work of Professor Charles Fine on industry clockspeed. 

In a paper written in 1996, Fine compared product technology clockspeed between aerospace (commercial aircraft) and media (infotainment). He noted that Boeing was launching roughly two new products per decade, while Disney was launching one new product per year, and concluding that media therefore has a faster clockspeed than aerospace. 

There are several problems with this comparison. Firstly, it doesn't seem to represent a fair comparison between the true rate of innovation in the two industries. If Disney films are made to a formula, and the basic formula doesn't change, how much innovation does each new film represent? This comes back to the point I raised in my original posts above.

Fine presumed that "Disney's product development teams ... work on a cycle time geared to the time between new product introductions". I don't have any inside information on Disney, and it appears he didn't either but from my experience in comparable media organizations I should expect multiple development teams working in parallel, with the ones doing the most innovative work taking several years to complete something.

Furthermore, Fine also observes that other parties in the Disney ecosystem (notably the distribution channels) have a much faster clockspeed. So he notes that "clockspeed may not be well-defined at the industry level since many industries are composites of others".

For John Hagel and myself, the more interesting innovation in the media industry was not Disney or Pixar churning out blockbuster films, but these firms converting themselves to platforms. But does the platform itself count as a product?

 

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Dave Bayless, Is the Pace of Business Really Increasing (7 September 2007), Critiques of the Red Queen Model (1 October 2007)

Charles H Fine, Industry Clockspeed and Competency Chain Design: An Introductory Essay (MIT Sloan WP 147-96, March 1996) 

John Hagel, Disney, Pixar and Jobs (3 February 2006)

Richard Veryard, Technology Hype Curve (16 September 2005), Disney, Pixar, Apple and Jobs (6 February 2006), Red Queen Effect (19 September 2005), Rates of Evolution (3 September 2007)