NEXT POINT ZERO - Chapter 2: Patterns of a revolution
Luca Sorgiacomo
5.0 Technologies for growth | Digital Transformation Expert | Founder @ Progress Lab
NOTE TO THE READER: This is a book chapter draft. Feel free to comment and propose ideas to improve and continue it.
If you want to be part of a revolution, you’d better understand the rules and forces that drive it so you can exploit them to your advantage and ride the tide instead of being overwhelmed by it. So in this chapter we’ll go through some theory about innovation that will be necessary to better understand what will come later. I promise I’ll keep it brief, but please hold tight and follow carefully as these are foundational principles that, if understood, will be the key to unlocking the hidden potential of your process, department and even your whole company.
Ready? Let’s start.
Performance Curves
When daring companies start experimenting with a new idea or technology, they invest significant amounts of time, effort, and money in something that has no immediate return, and in fact has a high risk of failure.
Many of these pioneering projects fail, but some manage to capitalize on the learning of others or manage to find resources to try again and again and again, until eventually one succeeds, reaping huge benefits and setting new standards in the market.
[EXPAND — GET TO THE POINT SLOWER]
But what does “setting new standards” mean? This is key, so let’s dive deeper.
The first thing to understand is the following: customer expectations are dictated by the current market offering. In other words, existing products define the range of possibilities that customers know they could have.
Let’s take cars for example. When choosing a car people have different criteria, but everybody knows you can’t have a car that is both luxurious and cheap or one that is sleek and sporty and at the same time can comfortably take a family with children camping in the mountains. We all implicitly know we’ll have to compromise, prioritizing the features that we care for the most (speed, room, comfort, safety, environment, cost, …) and get the best mix possible for our own taste.
***Insert examples of GRAPH OF PERFORMANCE CURVE
***Insert here EXPLANATIONS OF SAMPLE CURVES
So, without even noticing, we get accustomed to stay on these lines. We know that if we want to go higher on one axis, we’ll have to give up something on another. That’s our implicit assumption and expectation. But when these expectations are challenged, when a new technology or solution breaks through that invisible compromise barrier, then big things happen.
To illustrate this in more detail, we’ll take another example from the automotive industry, but one that is also both an historical and very actual one: electric cars.
Tesla has made them popular in our days but Elon Musk didn’t invent them, nor was the first to produce them. We need in fact to go back to the first half of the 19th century to witness their birth.
The first prototypes emerged in the 1830s, but practical models with rechargeable batteries and sufficient autonomy were brought to market later in the 1880s by multiple inventors, still decades before the famous Ford Model T.
At the time electric cars were actually more performant than gasoline powered vehicles: they were quieter, did not require changing gears and were on overall more comfortable to operate. As a testament of this, the first self-powered cabs in London and New York—that is, not drawn by horses—had an electric engine, and it was an electric sports car, the “Jamais Contente”, that first broke the 100 km/h and 60 mph records.
By the beginning of the 20th century the game could look like it was over. Combustion engine cars did have their use cases and loyal customers, as they on average could take you farther faster, but the market had reached an equilibrium with electric taking the biggest share of it.
So why did the combustion engine wasn’t the preferred choice and how did it take over the market? It was a mix of several factors.
One of the cons of the combustion engine was the need of turning it on by cranking. You know, that motion you see people doing in old silent movies, turning an angled shaft to make the engine start. Besides being an obnoxious activity, sometimes it posed dangers also: people even died by being hit by the shaft after it was suddenly pushed by the turned on engine. On the other hand, electric cars didn’t require the effort nor carried the risk.
However, in 1912 the electric starter motor was invented that removed the need of cranking and a year later the Ford Model T began production in an industrial setting that kept pushing for efficiency and drastically reduced the cost of producing and thus purchasing a car.
Other factors where at play, but stopping here will suffice for now. This was the picture: most consumer considered the electric car as the best mix of performances available; then, innovators offer a combustion engine car which is cheaper and doesn’t require cranking. Higher comfort, lower price. A totally different compromise curve. The market notices and the equilibrium moves.
But what does all this have to do with Industry 5.0? We’ll see it in more detail in chapter 2, but to give you a hint: it’s not about simply reducing costs. Setting a new standard is a key concept in business success. Implementing the Industry 5.0 model will give you the opportunity to achieve performances that others see as impossible. If applied with care, the principles outlined in this book will allow you to break through the trade-offs that are commonly accepted as standards in the market and thus blow away the competition without them even realizing.
Macro Trends
We’ve seen how technological and organizational innovations moved the compromise curve of the combustion engine above and beyond that of the electric one. But that was only one of the factors at play.
The other drivers of this major market shift didn’t relate directly to technological improvement, but to the wider socio-economic context.
One was infrastructure: in the 1920s roads, initially available mainly in cities and towns, spread to the country, making longer trips more viable and pushing for higher autonomy range. One could easily carry gasoline for refueling; not so with batteries, which weighed much more in proportion.
The other was the discovery of large reserves of oil in the US which made the price of gasoline drop, and thus also the cost of operating a gasoline powered car.
This is one example of how big market shifts are always driven by a positive feedback loop between technological progress and socio-economic changes that happen over some time. Decades in the past, but only years today.
To explain this dynamic feedback loop further I’ll use the story of a sweeping innovation from the recent decades, one that has been fundamental in preparing the way for the hyperconnected society in which we live, and therefore for the Industry 5.0 paradigm itself.
On January 2007, Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone as something that would represent three devices in one: a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, a breakthrough internet communication device. In and of itself this was a major innovation, one that had huge success in the market, but it’s not the one that changed society. Yes, it allowed people to call, listen to music and browse the internet through a single piece of mobile hardware; it was the first phone to have no keyboard and no pen, it reversed the race to smaller by introducing “larger” as a value, it was extremely performant and had a user interface that was easy and natural to use. But even if these features shifted significantly the performance curve of mobile phones, they didn’t change the habits of billions of people not interested in or unable to buy bulky, fancy, luxury performance gadgets.
The truly disruptive innovation the iPhone brought to the world was unveiled a year later after its launch. It was the App Store.
Why? Because for the first time the mobile phone had become an open system where you could run third party applications, like personal computers. What’s more, you didn’t even need to go and purchase those application somewhere else, you could find and install them directly on the device, making it not just an open system, but a distribution platform.
This innovation in approach was so disruptive that soon most mobile operating systems included their own version of it; it even leaked into other markets, notably smart TVs and Gaming. Remember that “app” wasn’t even a thing before then? Today every software is an “app”, even desktop programs are now called “apps”.
The visionary genius of Steve Jobs was evident in the fact that he deliberately created this new market. But the point here is not about being a genius, but recognizing that major changes in society are rarely created by a novel technology, but rather by a novel application of mature technologies that enables or encourages its widespread adoption.
The App Store and its siblings fuelled a race to exploit this new market. It was a new land, a unexplored wild west similar to the world wide web a decade earlier which literally spurred a gold rush. A huge amount of money went into the sector with scores of companies being born around the world with the only focus of building mobile apps. This in turn created two parallel effects, each pushing for the growth of the other.
On one side, it favored additional technological innovation linked to both software and hardware. In software it led to new programming languages, frameworks and architectures needed to adjust to mobile device capabilities, improve user experience on small screens, and move faster in a highly competitive market; in hardware it created a push for more and more powerful and usable devices, to make room for the creativity of app makers.
On the other hand, it gradually changed the habits of all the people that could have access to a smartphone, thanks to new ways of:
In review, we can see that the iPhone and other smartphones in themselves—the technology—were instrumental to a radical change in society but they weren’t the actual reason it happened. It was the novel application of existing technology that turned the tables and created a whole new market, which in turn spurred additional technological innovation and social change in a positive feedback loop with each other.
The birth of the mobile app market is an example of a macro trend where technology and society get in a reciprocally reinforcing relationship, a resonance so strong that breaks through the status quo in a disruptive way.
The industrial world, dealing with physical processes and not just software, is of course much slower and its feedback loop takes longer, but it’s happening. We’re now well inside that crescendo, waiting to see exactly which parts of society will be disrupted at the height of the Industry 5.0 macro trend.
Innovation Cycles
What we’re doing now is reviewing some general principles about innovation that will make you better understand how to apply the Industry 5.0 model in your business as explained in the coming sections of this book. We’ve seen that an innovation is something that breaks through the known trade off line between different performances, providing a solution that is superior in different aspects to the others currently in the market. Then we’ve seen some examples of how external trends linked to science, technology, politics and economics can influence the rise and fall of specific innovations.
Having understood what an innovation is and the macro forces that shape its destiny, we’ll now see how a market adopts it.
When it comes to growth and diffusion, it has been proven many times that each successful innovation goes through specific phases. Whether it be a simple process upgrade or a major societal trend, each of them follows a cycle that is always more or less the same. The length of the whole cycle and of each of its phases may vary, but the overall pattern remains.
To give you a general idea, you can think of caterpillars: they hatch and grow, moving slowly in a limited area; after a while they go through a phase of intense change and morph into a butterfly; then live some more time in that form benefiting from a wider range of action; and then they die.
Innovations do something similar. Each phase is linked to how fast the novelty is spreading and consequently to the number of people adopting it. We’ll also see that, in general the people adopting the change in each phase tend to have different attitudes and reasons to do so.
To explain this pattern I want to start with a story that has little to do with new technology, but still had lasting and widespread consequences. It is about the age of colonialism set off by the journey of Christopher Columbus and other explorers. As you read this story try to focus on the pattern we mentioned: how a trend gradually grows out of small events into a widespread shift and then dies off after a period of relative stability.
The Colonial Era
Columbus set sail from Spain in 1492 to find a shorter way to an already known destination, today’s Asia, by going round the world heading west, opposite to the existing routes. He was taking a very high risk, considering he was navigating in a direction no one in his knowledge had ever before sailed through, or at least had never come back to tell others about it. When he landed in what we today know as the Caribbeans he noticed local people wore ornaments of gold and were much less developed technologically and militarily and immediately spotted a huge opportunity. His methods of taking advantage of this opportunity were exploitational and tyrannical rather than innovative, since they were based on the enslaving and mistreatment of indigenous people. But we don’t want to focus as much on his personal actions or on the discovery itself, but rather on what happens next.
After Columbus returned to Spain, word spread out througout Europe about the discovery. A letter to the spanish monarchs he wrote on the way back was printed and diffused. Pope Alexander VI got involved in the buzz, defining policies to split overseas territories between Portugal and Spain through the publication of official papal documents.
Since then other explorers started navigating previously unknown ocean routes, most famously Vasco de Gama and Magellan. This was not just in the “new world”: Africa, the Pacific Islands, Australia and New Zealand were all destinations revealed to Europeans during the “Age of Discovery” of which Columbus’ voyage was one of the key initiating events.
Having discovered new lands, Spain and Portugal started to establish colonies to gather precious natural resources, make slaves, and gain additional power at home through new and more profitable commercial routes.
But after a few decades other nations decided they could benefit from this opportunity and also aimed at establishing colonies abroad: the French, British, Dutch and Russian one after the other started to claim territories and exploiting its resources and people.
This ferment lasted for a couple of centuries, till each party had enough room to expand without stepping too much on the toes of the others. But in the 18th century at least four distinct wars ensued between european nations over matters linked to the new balance of power that was emerging throughout the world. The end result of this phase determined the political setup of colonies for the next several decades and centuries.
In time the management of the colonies changed somewhat: for example, the composition of goods imported from them went from luxury items for direct consumption by the aristocracy to raw materials and food for the burgeoning European industrial cities (the first industrial revolution was underway). However, while colonies kept being connected and exploited by European nations in various ways, colonialism in the form of direct political control slowly died off, starting with the declaration of independence by the british american colonies in 1776 which then went on to form the United States of America. Nowadays most colonies have gained at least some sort of institutional independence from their former controlling empires.
If you enjoy reading about the rise and fall of nations and empires and the reason behind their dynamics I highly suggest “Why nations fails” by Daron Acemoglu
.
In summary, the age of discovery and colonialism was triggered by a small number of people, that is Columbus and other explorers linked to the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies, who took on the initial risk and gained the first pieces of the pie. For a while Spain and Portugal had a large “market” all for themselves and could easily split the pie in two. Later France, England, the Netherlands and others decided to enter the game: this started creating waves and accelerating a change that rippled throughout the world, until each player realized that each part of the pie had someone’s hands on it and started fighting each other to get as much as possible. This went on until some sort of shared equilibrium emerged. Other countries too came in later on trying to setup their own empire through colonies abroad, but by then most of the known world was already colonized and there was little left to get. Since then incremental changes in the colonial system, much smaller in magnitude, kept happening, but in the meantime a new wave of independence movements slowly started chipping away at the empires until they disappeared almost completely from the face of the earth.
See the pattern? Birth, slow growth, higher growth and turbulent change, equilibrium, decline.
I started on purpose with something unrelated to tech or manufacturing to underscore one important fact: the nature of the lifecycle of an innovation is not caused by the innovation itself, but it ties into?how people tend to adopt new things, whether it be new products or new knowledge. It’s about the approach that different groups of people have toward a specific novelty.
Just to avoid any doubt that this pattern is relevant also in the hard and tangible world of technology, I’ll also outline the lifecycle of a few other products that clearly followed the same sequence, each one related to the music industry, and specifically to the distribution of recorded audio.
A very brief history of music distribution
It all started with the phonograph, later also known as gramophone, which was the first device to be able to reproduce sound, and to record it. It was invented by Edison in 1877 and initially used a cylinder coated with wax as a the recording medium. Flat discs were introduced later in the 1890s as a solution to make multiple copies of a record from a single master and became the main medium for storing and distributing audio in the beginning of the 20th century. However, they remained a niche product until the advancement of recording technology which started using microphones and other electric apparatuses around three decades later; once recording became more accessible and effective, the need for discs rose and companies started fighting to establish their own format—mainly rotation speed and dimension—as the market standard. By the time the industry had settled on specific characteristics, the vynil disc had become the preferred music support and only marginal improvements were made…until the CD came and threw the disc back into the realm of niche products.
But the same thing happened to CDs too. The first prototype was unveiled in 1979 and later Philips and Sony joined forces to bring it to the mass market, which they did in 1982. At that time only few titles were published on it and were pretty expensive. But the technology had many advantages—more music could be stored in it, it was smaller and more durable—and it took only a few years for the market to notice and make the switch: in 1991 CD sales had surpassed both vynil and cassettes, becoming the industry standard. From then incremental improvements were made, optimizing the disc for specific uses and bringing to market the recordable and rewritable discs in the late 90’s. These made CDs the go-to solution not just for mass production, but also to create home made custom playlist, by “burning” songs onto it. This was the last remaining practical use case for cassettes, which also received from the CD their fatal blow. [1]
And remember how home-made playlist were burned on CDs? It was mainly in the MP3 format, one that facilitated distribution of audo files because it was small in size while retaining good audio quality. It became an ISO standard in 1998 and then grew in popularity thanks to the newly born internet which allowed the sharing and download of files through software such as Napster, eMule and the like. Portable audio players had already been popular since the 1979 when Sony started producing the first Walkman. Initially designed for playing back cassettes, the Walkman and other portable players had switched to playing CDs, but as digital music started to grow companies focused on producing portable devices that would allow the direct storage of MP3 and other digital format without the need of a separate medium such as cassettes or CDs, setting the stage for their gradual decline. The life of MP3 as protagonist itself however didn’t last long. With the advent of app-powered connected smartphones came the rise of streaming services that now rule the music distribution market and have relegated, once again, an old mainstay into a corner.
In 2021 both Vynils and CDs have made a sort of comeback, but together they still account for less than 15% of overall recorded music sales, with streaming keeping center stage at 80% share. [2]
Discs, CDs and MP3s all showed the same pattern seen before: slow growth after birth, then a period of market turmoil and high growth, a time of relative stability with a mature product and a gradual decline.
Besides confirming the pattern, seeing three successive innovations in the same market space allows us to notice that the lifecycle of successive innovations overlap each other. This is because the decline of one solution is linked to the high growth of a new one, which is why the high growth phase of an innovation can be synonym of market turbulence: it’s not just a matter of a new thing being widely adopted, but it’s also companies, processes and customer habits shifting rapidly, not without troubles, from established solution to newer ones. This is what economist Joseph Schumpeter referred to as “creative destruction”, or the process by which successful innovations cause the death of the status quo, giving birth to a new one.
Innovation adoption model
We’ve been covering a lot, riding through the rise and fall of multiple market innovations in different context. If this pattern still feels a bit obscure, don’t worry. You can go back and re-read it later, but bear with me for a few more minutes to cover one last fundamental concept.
Earlier on I said that the “shape” of the lifecycle is not determined by the innovation, but by how people adopt new things. For one last time, let’s review the cycle from this point of view:
Why are these groups important to know? There are two reasons. The first is the advantage you can gain by knowing how the market moves. It will help you navigate the successive waves of innovation, weighing the pros and cons on joining at different stages, based on your target ROI, your desired positioning against the competition, your available resources and and your propension to risk. The second is because it will help you also plan your change programs more effectively, by timing your implementation and addressing different groups of stakeholders according to their specific needs. We will cover this more deeply later on when talking about implementation plans.
Playing a part in today’s Revolution
Now that we have covered the general principles defyning the evolution of innovation waves such as Industrial Revolutions, you are ready to better understand the current context and your place in it.
Although the technologies linked to Industry 5.0 have been around for several years now, their application are still in the process of gaining full steam. As we said in the introduction, this is both a broad and deep market shift, involving multiple specialized domain, industrial sectors and impacting many areas of business and social life. That’s why, unlike the innovation cycle of a single product or technology, industrial revolutions unfold over years and decades, but the underlying pattern remains.
So where are we at now? Let’s review the recent history starting from the origin of the term.
The German government started thinking strategically about Industry 4.0 in 2011, but it took a while for the rest of the world to take notice. It was only in 2017 that Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF), published his book about Industry 4.0, but then he published yet another one the year after in 2018, and In January 2019 the WEF published in collaboration with McKinsey?[3]?a report about “Lighthouse Plants”, a network of production sites throughout the world that have successfully implemented Industry 4.0 technologies that others can visit to learn. Also outside the WEF, the acceleration was palpable. In the last decade governments have started providing financial incentives for investments in new technologies, supporting startups in the field, and creating mixed private-public entities, with the goal of supporting companies in adopting the new paradigm*. Events, exhibitions and associations have started popping up everywhere. Climate change initiatives pushed for energy monitoring and control and then COVID added steam, requiring business to get accustomed with digital technology to accomodate remote working and funneling a good part of the financial incentives packaged by government into this strand of innovation [4].
In 2021 Industry 4.0 was all the rage. Everybody talked about it. Everybody wanted to implement it. The concept of 5.0 had been out for a few years but was more focused on society as a whole, until the European published its own manifesto about Industry 5.0. Since then industrial pundits have started picking up on the 5.0 mantra to feed something new to the public and raise interest on the sector in the midst of the turmoil caused by the war in Europe, the climate change crisis and worldwide economic headaches.
But talking about it and actually doing something are totally different matters.
If you’ve ever felt perplexed with stories about super successful digital transformations you’re not alone. In their talks, webinars, whitepapers and product demos consultants and suppliers stress the highs while carefully downplaying the lows of their case studies, understandably. But the truth is that those stories are very different from the everyday reality of most companies: in 2018 another publication from McKinsey highlighted how most digitalization projects, 84% of them in fact?[5], either failed or didn’t sustain their results in time.
While those that try to adopt the new model for themselves are still struggling, other companies have had a lot of success capitalizing on the marketing hype, selling products and services linked to IoT, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, robotics etc. New solutions are coming up every day to make life easier for those that want to make the leap, and with the huge stimulus coming from governments in various countries, everybody is jumping on the bandwagon. Even with such a high failure rate, with so many trying, in a few years a good chunk of manufacturers will be ready to reap the benefit of their investments.
So, where are we at now? Referring back to the innovation lifecycle, innovators and early adopters have already made their move and we are now in the high-growth stage driven by the early majority adopters. We’re at the tipping point. If you haven’t joined the revolution already, now is the time to do so or be left behind, becoming part of the minority followers joining in when most others have already reaped the benefits.
Do not be fooled: the industrial world moves slower and quieter than the consumer market. You might not feel it in your day to day, but if you look around you will find more and more examples of leaders and companies that manage to leverage innovative approaches and technologies to empower their people and delight their customer. The fact that such changes may go unnoticed by incumbents until it is too late, is what former Harvard professor and businessman Clayton Christensen illustrated in his famous book “The Innovator’s Dilemma”. I recommend you read it: it clearly explains how it is totally possible to be blindsided and taken over even if you’re a leader in your sector.
So, if you work in a large corporation that owns a good chunk of the market, but hasn’t already started a serious change program about Industry 5.0, you’d better start moving in that direction, because the risk of losing customers in the near future to more innovative competitors is very real.
On the other hand, if you’re in a smaller company, you must not fear competing with big Goliaths with multi-billion budgets. You can be more agile, move faster, stay closer to your customer and you have plenty of market to snip at.
If, regardless of size, you do not have cutting edge equipment and don’t want or can’t afford to renew it, know that there are many ways to make significant progress on your 5.0 agenda without breaking the bank or upend your physical processes. It is not about some futuristic equipment or complex software applications: what you need is a technology-enabled organizational change that will make your company move faster than your competitors and cruise past them as they watch.
And not only. If you, like me, are the kind of person who likes to act for a higher purpose, consider this: as you apply these principles to develop a more competitive process, department or company, you will not only reap benefits for yourself and your employer or employees, but you will help create and spread a long-term oriented, people-centered, waste-removing, data-driven culture that is so much needed in a suffering world.
In conclusion, the final point I want to make is the following: you have no excuse not to take advantage of this opportunity. The wave is catching on. You can decide to stand up and surf and be part of the revolution or watch the wave go past you. It’s up to you.