Comments on: Craft or Scale? An Innovation Dilemma

By: uberVU - social comments

uberVU - social comments — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 00:46:31 +0000

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This post was mentioned on Twitter by timkastelle: New blog post: Craft or Scale? An #Innovation Dilemma http://bit.ly/8kl5pV...

By: Craft-Based Business Models « Business Models « Innovation Leadership Network

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 06:09:42 +0000

[...] one of the nice fan pages for Independent Project Records, and here’s my original post on craft versus scale. Like Unlike Share and [...]

By: Graham Horton

Graham Horton — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 17:21:31 +0000

If you like Hagel and Singer’s “unbundled corporation” then “craft” would correspond to “product innovation” and and “scale” would correspond to “infrastructure management”. The interesting thing is that a third route is implied: “customer relationship management”. In the example in the article, this would mean a company that provides highly specialised indexing to a niche of customers with whom they nurture a close relationship. Perhaps such services already exist…?

Graham

By: Tim

Tim — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 03:48:01 +0000

Good point Sam. Of course, diggit, reddit etc. aren’t trying for comprehensive coverage – which is probably the biggest difference between them and DMOZ (and that’s a HUGE issue…).

By: Sam MacAulay

Sam MacAulay — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 03:38:36 +0000

“DMOZ tried to crowdsource indexing, and even that couldn’t keep up”

Interesting to think that there has been sort of a resurgence via crowd sourcing filtering (diggit etc).

By: Tim

Tim — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 03:11:51 +0000

Possibly – although the Dewey Decimal system is hopeless for IT-related classification – everything gets crammed into an incredibly small range of numbers. So we’d still need some innovation there!

By: John

John — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 02:57:35 +0000

‘In December of 1992, there were 50 websites on the internet.’
I remember some librarians at the time complaining about how poor the internet’s catelog system was. And how what was really needed was good application of the Dewey system by librarians. They could still be right.

By: Tim

Tim — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 23:56:01 +0000

That’s an excellent example of the disruption that’s caused at the transition points. It’s pretty bad going the other way too, when the market stops working at scale – lots of people end up losing their jobs as it reverts to a craft…

By: Marco

Marco — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 23:44:40 +0000

Tim,
This reminds me my own experience more than a decade now. When I obtained my first degree, which was in computer science with a specialisation in 3D graphics, I came to the realisation that I was at the end of an era. 3D graphics (before Toy Story) was a craft that is “hand made” my talented programmers. But then, quickly, all the knowledge that I had learnt (or will learn) about 3D graphics in my $50,000 degree could be put in a tiny chip that costs $50.
I have only 3 options then: continue the arms race with the chip and push my knowledge and skills further in the high-end (R&D), play support or maintenance role to the 3D chips (the same role that people at yahoo and google play today), or branch out in other unexplored directions.
Going the R&D way meant going to graduate school and committing myself to a long-term career in a highly competitive environment. Playing a support role had little appeal to me and lacked the sense of satisfaction that I was seeking. So I chose the latter option, which meant I had to basically throw away all the specialised knowledge and skill that I had spent years to develop.
In my situation, the only truly useful (and long-lasting) knowledge that I gained from that degree from its “general education” component: all those courses in anthropology, philosophy, organic chemistry, accounting, political history that had nothing to do 3D graphics but I was MADE to take. And I am grateful for that!