From Justin Fox at Bloomberg View:
The notion that we’re getting worse at generating big, world-changing
ideas has been gaining currency. As the Wall Street Journal’s Greg Ip wrote earlier this month:
Outside
of personal technology, improvements in everyday life have been
incremental, not revolutionary. Houses, appliances and cars look much
like they did a generation ago. Airplanes fly no faster than in the
1960s. None of the 20 most-prescribed drugs in the U.S. came to market
in the past decade.
Is this because all the
“low-hanging fruit,” a phrase that I think my Bloomberg View colleague
Tyler Cowen should get most of the credit (or blame) for popularizing,
has been plucked already? Is it because government regulators are
standing in the way of innovation? Is it because investors are pushing
too hard for immediate gratification?
I don’t know! I’m not even
sure we really are witnessing a slowdown in world-changing innovation.
But I do have yet another theory for why we might be: We’ve gotten so
good at non-world-changing innovation that we don’t have time for the
world-changing stuff.
This thought occurred to me while I was reading “Superconsumers: A Simple, Speedy, and Sustainable Path to Superior Growth,”
a fun little book by Eddie Yoon, who works at the Cambridge Group, a
consulting firm that’s part of market-research giant Nielsen Holdings
Plc.
Yoon
argues that paying close attention to the most committed, enthusiastic
consumers of a product can teach you lots of things about how to market
and improve your own offerings.
The notion that companies should identify and focus on their best or most profitable customers isn’t new. Neither is the idea that understanding customers’ needs and desires is important.
What Yoon describes is an approach that mixes serious data mining and
personal connections (his wife, for example, is a superconsumer of
scissors) to help companies find new sources of growth....MORE
HT:
Ritholtz@Bloomberg
