Innovator's DNA, Updated, with a New Preface by Clayton M. Christensen & Hal Gregersen & Jeff Dyer

Author:Clayton M. Christensen & Hal Gregersen & Jeff Dyer [Clayton M. Christensen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
Published: 2019-05-13T16:00:00+00:00

Take Apart Products, Processes, and Ideas

In 1980, Michael Dell looked forward with great anticipation to his sixteenth birthday. However, he was most excited because his parents had finally agreed to let him purchase his own computer—an Apple II. On the day the computer arrived, Dell was so anxious to get his hands on it that he made his dad drive him down to the UPS office to pick it up. What he did next both shocked and dismayed his parents, but it also proved to be instrumental in his discovery of the “direct from Dell” business model. “After we pulled into my driveway,” Dell recalled, “I jumped out of the car, carried the precious cargo to my room, and the first thing I did was take my new computer apart. My parents were infuriated. An Apple cost a lot of money in those days, and they thought I had demolished it. But I just wanted to see how it worked.” Dell’s desire to understand what made his Apple II tick led to a variety of experiments designed to make his computer work better and faster. He bought a variety of components and add-ons to enhance his personal computer, like more memory, disk drives, faster modems, and bigger monitors. He soon learned how to make some money from his “hobby.” “I would enhance a PC the way another guy would soup up a car. Then I would sell it for a profit and do it again,” says Dell. “I was soon going to distributors and buying PC components in bulk to reduce the costs. I remember my mother complained that my room looked like a mechanic’s shop.”

Dell soon gained enough familiarity with the cost of PC components that he acquired an important insight. At the time, an IBM PC sold in a store for around $2,500 to $3,000. But the exact same components could be purchased for $600 or $700, and IBM didn’t own the technology. Dell told us that this raised a critical question in his mind: “Why does it cost five times more to buy a PC in the store than the parts cost?” He realized that he could buy the latest components, assemble them in the exact configuration a customer wanted, and deliver it for far less than the retail price in a store. Thus, the “direct from Dell” business model was born.

Like Dell, many innovators hit on an innovative idea while taking something apart—a product, a process, a company, a technology. For example, Google’s Page is also a tinkerer who likes to deconstruct things. Page’s brother gave him a set of screwdrivers when he was nine years old, which he used to completely take apart every power tool his family had in the house. In similar fashion, Page tinkered with various ideas related to efficiently searching the web, eventually hitting on the page-ranking idea that searched the web in a way that was very different from the other search engines at the time. Another experimenter, Albert Einstein,

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