Tim O'Reilly
October 08, 2012
Ideas are tools for thinking with. In the
world of business, people like Peter Drucker, Clayton Christenson, and
Michael Porter have each given new insights that have shaped the
dialogue about how to do business successfully. Well, add Michael
Schrage to that list. Read his new ebook, Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become?, and you'll never think about the process of innovation in the same way.
Great innovators, Schrage argues, don't just conceive new products, they reconceive the customers for those products. Think for a moment about how Henry Ford didn't just create cars - he had to create a whole new vision of society in order to create customers for those cars. Edison didn't just invent the lightbulb and the phonograph, he invented people who came to rely on those things, and everything else that electricity now lets us take for granted.
We're in the middle of one of these great transitions in who we are, and what society will become, driven first by the internet, and now the smartphone. Our always-on culture turns us into a different kind of people. Google, Apple, Amazon all are great companies because they change our expectations about what is possible and how we live.
It's easy to see what Schrage calls "the Ask" in big technological transformations like these. But he makes a convincing case that this is a question that every business needs to be asking. If you aren't asking your customer to be someone different, it's likely that your business and your products aren't very differentiated either.
I certainly see "the Ask" in our business at O'Reilly. The innovators we're focusing on in practice areas like open source software, open government, data science, and web operations are all making big asks of their customers, and as I discussed in my piece It's Not About You, our job is to help them make that ask. And of course, with ebooks and products like Safari Books Online, we're asking people to change their expectations about instant gratification of their information needs and their ability to learn.
Jim Stogdill, the General Manager of our Radar business, is the one who brought this book to my attention. In a lot of ways, the heart of his job is asking how technology will change not just its users, but every business that is part of the value chain delivering that technology to those users.
Great innovators, Schrage argues, don't just conceive new products, they reconceive the customers for those products. Think for a moment about how Henry Ford didn't just create cars - he had to create a whole new vision of society in order to create customers for those cars. Edison didn't just invent the lightbulb and the phonograph, he invented people who came to rely on those things, and everything else that electricity now lets us take for granted.
We're in the middle of one of these great transitions in who we are, and what society will become, driven first by the internet, and now the smartphone. Our always-on culture turns us into a different kind of people. Google, Apple, Amazon all are great companies because they change our expectations about what is possible and how we live.
It's easy to see what Schrage calls "the Ask" in big technological transformations like these. But he makes a convincing case that this is a question that every business needs to be asking. If you aren't asking your customer to be someone different, it's likely that your business and your products aren't very differentiated either.
I certainly see "the Ask" in our business at O'Reilly. The innovators we're focusing on in practice areas like open source software, open government, data science, and web operations are all making big asks of their customers, and as I discussed in my piece It's Not About You, our job is to help them make that ask. And of course, with ebooks and products like Safari Books Online, we're asking people to change their expectations about instant gratification of their information needs and their ability to learn.
Jim Stogdill, the General Manager of our Radar business, is the one who brought this book to my attention. In a lot of ways, the heart of his job is asking how technology will change not just its users, but every business that is part of the value chain delivering that technology to those users.
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