I think so.
Although I think that “Blue Ocean Strategy” is “old wine on new bottles” they got a major point when saying that you should not look at how you can get a piece of an already existing marketplace – create new ones.
In Europe we’ve seen several examples on how well known market players have lost market share – almost dropped out of the marketplace. One nice example it the aviation-industry where we over the past few years have seen completely new players. And why?
Because the best breed entrepreneurs is looking on the possibilities with completely different eyes. Or what?
Skype is a good example – the technology is “old”, not invented by Skype, but the serviceoffering is new. And their businessmodel is interesting, execution is breathtaking.
I know its old news when saying that disruptive move’s in the valuechain is unpredictable – but I think there are a lot of companies that need to open their eyes and I think design is one of the “tools”
The development in the technological area is an another……..
2 comments so far
One of our areas of expertise here at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea is service design, and I know that there’s been some discussion amongst students about what actually constitutes service design. What part of it is design? Is it really just business with a different name? Where does the design end and business begin?
I myself have had some difficulty parsing service design into neat chunks, and I keep toying with the idea of pursuing an MBA after this Masters just to round things out and get the business perspective on things. In my design process I tend to focus more on the motivations and concepts, which inevitably bleeds into the business aspects such as business models.
I’m comfortable with that. I believe in blurry boundaries around subjects, not neatly divided domains. That’s the nature of interdisciplinary learning: everything is connected. So why not a connection between design and business?
Maybe it’s my nature as a generalist to take this position, but I see interaction design as being relevant not only to the nitty gritty of physical knobs and buttons, but also to the situations which shape and influence those discrete interactions. The question then becomes, where do you stop?
If I look at the button on the ATM machine, then I can zoom out to the ATM machine itself. And then I can zoom out to the relationship between the ATM and the bank. And then I can zoom out and look at banking in general. And then I can zoom out and look at the nature of money.
My point isn’t to invalidate this process, but rather the opposite: to say that the button the ATM machine is in every way connected to the question about the nature of money. (Of course this is just an example.) The design process kicks in when we start to look at how to connect the zoomed out vision with the discrete interactions and interfaces.
Good design is dependent upon understanding the context into which it is inserted, just as good business is ultimately dependent upon whether someone knows which buttons to push.
CHP127 Followup
Following up on my comments on the CHP127 blog post I mentioned earlier, I just ran across the following in Paul Hawkens The Ecology of Commerce:
As author Dennis Meadows explains it, Economists assume the future will be much like t…