Designing for Disruption

Designing for disruption
mindsets for thinking about innovation
https://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/josullivan59/3264396897

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require unprecedented degrees of creativity"
Capitalising on Complexity - 2010 IBM CEO Study
create entirely new situations..."
converging and influencing each other to
at us faster or with less predictability; they are
"events, threats and opportunities aren't just coming
"...these first-of-their-kind developments

“The big shift”
Measuring the forces of long-term change
John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, Lang Davison
https://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/joi/2253804907/

Source: The Power of Pull; An Examination of Firms in the Brave New World of 21st Century Internet Economics by John Seely Brown
years
creation of new
infrastructural technology
period of rapid
disruption
stability
stability
~60 yrs
 
Stable s-curve over decades
• 18th, 19th 20th century
infrastructure
• goal was to develop
scalable eﬃciency
The past

years
stability?
stability?
period of rapid
disruption
creation of new
infrastructural technology
• 21st century driven by
continuous exponential
advances of computation,
storage, bandwidth…
 
Rapid set of punctuated moves 
(potentially never ending?)
The present
Source: The Power of Pull; An Examination of Firms in the Brave New World of 21st Century Internet Economics by John Seely Brown

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/34233222@N05/4292987392
Three mindsets for thinking about design and
innovation in times of great uncertainty and
opportunity.

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obsolete, and fast.” - Seth Godin
“The extraordinary revolution of media choice”
program our consumption is becoming
“The idea that someone can

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/jenny-pics/5661879987
the balance of power
has shifted...

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/arenamontanus/3496433929
we can no longer expect customers
predictable manner...
in a linear, exclusive, or
to interact with our creations

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/ncanup/3526550845
to create experiences for them...
users no longer have to wait for us

26 Amazon Dash Button Hacks You
Probably Didn't Know About
1. Call Uber
2. Order pizza
3. Order beer
4. Order anything from Amazon
5. Track baby data
6. Log your habits into a Google Spreadsheet
7. Add things to a grocery list
8. Track music practice
9. Log your time spent studying
10. Track your work hours
11. Control any power outlet in your home
12. Control Philips Hue lights
13. Control your Tesla's Air Conditioning
14. Netﬂix and chill
(and can ﬁnd instructions for online)
they can change it
if something doesn't suit them,

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/24763767@N03/3907937027
…enhance it
Kindle
teleprompter

http://twitter.com/#!/joindiaspora
…compete with it
Shopping mall app store
Curation & tech
support
Social discovery
Serendipity...(and fun!)

replace it
…or maybe even
New Matter $400
3D printer

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/salty_soul/4737350118
necessarily a bad thing
...this isn’t

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/tiseb/13541804
people don't necessarily want the perfect product..."
counterintuitive but there is growing evidence that
incomplete, and possibly even substandard seems
"Issuing your customers with something that is rough,

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/emerson12/2682480262
around the edges that they can adapt or improve."
"...they prefer to deal with something ragged
Loose, Martin Thomas

a pragmatic mix of beautiful, and ‘good enough’
https://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/yto/4923423098/
some of the world’s largest brands
thrive by designing products that reﬂect

https://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/52526343@N05/4843218498
“we want to give customers
the kind of satisfaction that comes
out as “this will do”, not “this is what I want”.
It’s not appetite, but acceptance.”
Kenya Hara, Designer, MUJI

Whether you embrace this mindset or not…people will always
ﬁnd their own uses for a thing.

…like this man who
sells sheep—on Instagram

https://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/bombardier/5456285991
“…if you have an Instagram account, you can slap a tag
on anything, take a picture of it, and sell it...”
– Fatima Al Qadiri, Mousse magazine

more than 10,000 similar businesses
are powered by Facebook...
over in Thailand,

Neither of these examples have been implicitly facilitated by the
platform…they’ve simply been fuelled by the ability to communicate
and share, on any device, and with a wide audience.

Find a social vendor1
Source: Why Southeast Asia is Leading the world’s most disruptive business models

2
Browse products

3
Inquire via messaging
(WhatsApp, Line, WeChat, Messenger, SMS etc.)

4
Get payment details
(PayPal, WeChat, Alipay, bank account etc.)

5
Conﬁrm payment

6 Ship and track

behaviours desire paths…
city planners call these ad-hoc
https://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/30356354@N05/14943696241/

and provide clues to faults,
footprints that reveal actual usage
gaps or opportunities
behaviours desire paths…
city planners call these ad-hoc

Here’s an example of a company that leveraged desire
paths to completely re-imagine their business…

Meet yy.com—a “Google
Hangouts” style platform
with over 300 million users
and 11 million channels,
and programs ranging from
karaoke, to “talk radio” and
educational topics.

YY.com began as a social gaming site with video chatrooms
so gamers could discuss strategy. The site grew very fast. 
They had growth…but no proﬁt.

chatrooms, people weren’t just chatting—
some people were singing”
“…until they realised that inside some of the
https://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/saad/2513736/
— NPR Planet Money

So the yy team decided to experiment…

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/mckaysavage/135932500/
virtual tickets so they could vote for their
on sale [on TaoBao*] for about $0.25 a piece!”
favourite singers…a little later, they found the tickets
“…they gave their users free
*giant C2C e-commerce marketplace

YY now oﬀers its own virtual currency.
Users purchase credits and use them to
show aﬀection for their favourite stars
by buying them virtual gifts such as
roses and lollipops.
Gifts range in cost from mere pennies to
as much as $50 (£35) and yy gets a cut
of each transaction.

“top Karaoke singers regularly make $20K (£15K) a month
oﬀ of virtual gifts, with one college student reportedly
earning an astonishing $188K (£150K) per month
using the site to give Photoshop lessons”
- The largest social network you’ve never heard of

In 2014, yy IPOed and more than 50% of their revenue now comes
from their virtual currency enabled music business.

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of a product into society...
of 50 million to mark the "penetration"
marketers often use an audience

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(which was usually a good thing)
historically, market penetration took time,

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the development of social norms,
with time came stronger mental models,
laws, infrastructure…

a product or technology might
…and an understanding of how
ﬁt into our lives...

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time is now often a luxury...
for better or worse

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a market penetration of 50 million...
it took radio 40 years to reach
Source: ReWired, Larry D. Rosen

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/sarahreido/4566354684Source: ReWired, Larry D. Rosen
10 years to 'adapt' to television...
by comparison, we had only

while the iPod took only 5 years...
iconic

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPPj6viIBmU
less than 6 months...
and YouTube,

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/introducing-google-project-real-life.html
in less than half this time...
Google+ reached that milestone
Google + in fact reached this
milestone in about 3 months... to
the tune of 2million new users a
day!

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is now also increasingly diverse
our reach increasingly wide, our audience
social ,and the internet, not only is
but thanks to mobile,

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at a pace that was once unheard of...
technology adoption is creating 'generation gaps'
researchers are discovering that our rapid

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/tocaboca/5523598823
Lee Rainie, Pew Research Center, Internet and American Life Project
experiences with technology."
are having completely diﬀerent
"People two, three or four years apart

How diﬀerent age groups think about technology is important,
but in a global marketplace, it’s the cultural, historical and
societal diﬀerences that will often make or break a product.

China has 14 cities with populations
over ﬁve million...
https://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/decar66/6341327886 Source: Wikipedia, China Highlights

...a whopping 41 cities with
more than 2 million inhabitants
http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/tahini/10468208216

...and a “middle class” growing at a rate of
80,000 people a day
http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/tahini/10468208216 Source: China Connect

rural residents can be challenging
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reaching China’s 600 million
for brands in this market,

its close to 700 million urban residents
but no more so than
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opening enough stores to service

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to many Chinese, shopping online
isn’t so much an electronic version of commerce,
it *is* commerce, pure and simple
it’s therefore not surprising that

https://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/curious_e/10473440064
...and using their mobile to do so isn’t just
a modern alternative to using a PC, it’s their primary
(or sometimes only) means of using the internet

…these factors combined help to
explain why Chinese e-commerce
has developed quite diﬀerently
than in Europe or N America
76%
of online retail
involves individual
merchants
of online retail
involves online
marketplaces90%

Marketplaces—such as Alibaba’s TMall and TaoBao—provide an economically, socially and
technologically appropriate alternative to missing infrastructure: high visibility, high traﬃc,
customizable, social-media + mobile optimized commerce.

apple.tmall.com
Which is why even Apple has a storefront on TMall.

…but what’s important here isn’t China, its the group of
characteristics it represents.
Find similar conditions elsewhere, and you may be able to
replicate aspects of this model.

“...most of the people have phones but
there are only 3 malls per 20 million inhabitants*…
It’s a unique time...the right time to leapfrog over ‘oﬄine’.”
- jumia.com co-founder
THE BIGGEST ONLINE SHOPPING MALL IN AFRICA
Egypt | Kenya | Uganda| Ivory Coast| Nigeria | Morocco
*that’s 60K people per retail outlet compared to 7K in APAC and 389 in the U.S.)

brands in these markets can experiment…
ignore what’s “normal” and find
the most locally appropriate
https://www.flickr.com/photos/yto/3640718959
with little baggage to weigh them down,
path to profit

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on Instagram [and WhatsApp] with our customers…
we literally have some customers who have ordered
multiple times and never spoken to us…
- How WhatsApp helped Jumia disrupt Africa
“…our [agents] chat all day long
never placed an order online”

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a pair of shoes, return it, and then buy the next size…
so we thought let’s encourage them to order two
or three sizes…and pay only for what they accept
- How WhatsApp helped Jumia disrupt Africa
“...we saw that customers would order

(just in case this still feels like an edge case…)

Russian e-commerce brand
Lamoda has turned poor postal
infrastructure into an excuse to
deliver items you didn’t even
ask for and up-sell you at the
door as you try them on…

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/sparker/460227098
interdependent systems of experience...
designing multi-layered and tightly
while companies such as Apple are successfully
(for the moment) still

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/cdharrison/2407640646
their success relies in great part on
most touch points and interactions...
their ability to control and contain

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have this luxury...
most products will not

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be the ﬁrst to fail...
orchestrated products may in fact
today the most perfectly

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for each layer of experience
there will be trade-oﬀs
in complexity

actors in the ecosystem...
and an increasing reliance on other
http://www.flickr.com/photos/flavouz/3137171590
cost of aluminium?
environmental lobby,
recycling?
IP battles, user ‘hacking’,
knock-off capsules

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/zyphbear/446780548
that have become all too common
...reducing a product's ability to react
to the abrupt changes in environment
fuel costs?
autonomous vehicles, sharing
economy, union protests
economic slowdowns

…unless, you design your product, from the ground up to
thrive amidst disruption.

On August 11 2014, online media company BuzzFeed closed a
$50M funding round and announced the creation of a new group
called BuzzFeed Distributed.
The aim of the group would be to address a growing problem…

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/misbehave/2352753067
forever changed the way we communicate
mobile and social have
(this can be both a blessing and a curse)

60M
Referrals to
BuzzFeed.com
349M
12.5M
Source: Buzzfeed SXSW 2015

60M
349M
Impressions in the
social stream
847M 11.3B
6.4B
12.5M

Instead of trying to lure eyeballs to its own website, BuzzFeed
would experiment with ways to publish original content directly to
where its audience already spent their time—some 30 diﬀerent
global platforms.

BuzzFeed also built
Pound*, a sharing-
analysis technology that
goes beyond traditional
analytics that only
capture traﬃc….
what traditional analytics show…
*Process for Optimizing and
Understanding Network Diﬀusion
Source: Buzzfeed

Instead, Pound captures
how stories spread on the
social web from one
person to another,
including downstream
visits across networks and
1-2-1 platforms like Gchat
and email.
what is actually happening
Source: Buzzfeed

BuzzFeed uses this data to
inform new experiments
and continuously improve
content ﬁt, and placement.
People making
stuff
Apps
Distributed
Web
content
data, learnings,
$$$
contentdata, learnings, $$$
content
data, learnings, 
$$$

“…it increasingly doesn’t matter where our
content lives…and that can be a huge
advantage and it’s something that I think lots
of media companies get scared of…but we
think it can make us a stronger company”
— Jonah Peretti

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/jurvetson/302869583
the future is rarely
short on narratives…

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/mwichary/3189145257
…and a great many of them
are currently about data

the future will be full of
opportunities to measure…
Twitter: Bill Gross

Proteus Digital Health - Digital health feedback system
to track…
swallow a smart pill
wear a patch
…track these
things using
our app

…to anticipate, to recommend,
to test and to optimize…
Almax - EyeSee Mannequin

Photo: Mashable
…it may even be tempting to believe
that data will be all you need

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/tijanav/4885088185
“You have to use a lot of intuition and a lot of creativity,
and the data is one part of the input…”

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/tijanav/4885088185
“…data will tell you, if you're very lucky,
what happened. It won't ever tell you why.
If you want to understand why, that requires a diﬀerent set
of skills, largely in your brain and in your heart”.
Dao Nguyen, BuzzFeed data maven, courtesy Wired
“You have to use a lot of intuition and a lot of creativity,
and the data is one part of the input…”

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/tinou/453593446
hello@yiibu.com thank you
http://www.slideshare.net/yiibu/letting-go-9109114
many thanks to the
amazing photographers
on
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0
http://www.ﬂickr.com/creativecommons/by-2.0
licensed under
available on
@yiibu
contact us
at

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