Disruptive innovation strikes at the foundations of the U.K. hotel market

About a month ago I got a text message from a friend here in Taiwan asking me if I knew of any cheap hotels in London. Actually, I didn't have a clue as I've only been to London twice in my life, a long time ago. I remembered reading an interesting post on the Innosight blog about disruptive innovation in the hotel market, though, so I sent her a link to the hotel that was in the article, Yotel.com.


The BBC ran an interesting piece about Yotel.com and easyHotel (part of the easyJet group) today. What was really interesting was finding out about the origins of the cheap hotel concept: the idea came not from within the hotel industry but outside it. Check out the video and see for yourself. (You'll need Real Player to see this)

The video below will give you an idea what one of the "cabins" is like. What's really amazing about truly disruptive innovations is the amount of free media coverage that they get. If these innovations were incremental improvements (along a sustaining trajectory), they wouldn't even be noticed.




I'll have to ask my friend where she ended up staying the next time I see her. So what do you think, would you be willing to give this a try the next time you're passing through London?

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Merle C Crawford's Charter for Product Innovation (PIC)

Here's another short presentation on Merle C Crawford's "Charter for Product Innovation." When I was working on this today, I started thinking that perhaps firms pursue two innovation strategies at the same time. For example, in the case of Apple and Nike, these firms could be described as pursuing both (Adaptive) + (Economic) innovation strategies. However, I then realized that just because these firms seek to maximise their margins by finding Taiwanese partners that can pump out their products cheaply and to a high standard, this does not mean that they are pursuing an (Economic) innovation strategy. It's the main area in which innovation occurs that shows the firm's real innovation strategy.



The main thing about innovation that I was trying to get across with this presentation was the fact that innovation is all too often associated with cool people with funny eyeware and floppy fringes in the West. What about all those hard working guys and gals in Asia that innovate every day in factories built to churn out notebook computers and digital cameras by the millions?

Myths of innovation

I was looking at some old Van Halen videos on YouTube last night and I came across a 1982 interview with the band's lead singer, David Lee Roth (Diamond Dave). During the interview, he made some very candid and insightful comments about his rise to fame. One that I really liked was this one, on the topic of innovation:

" . . . inspiration doesn't come from nowhere. You don't just lie in a dark, black room and suddenly a burst of light and the hand of the Lord comes out and says, 'Here, have a song.' It doesn't happen like that: you have to steal it from somebody. You change this, you change that. If it was good enough for Beethoven, it's good enough for me."

Nice one Dave! You can watch the interview HERE. (Warning! There is some big hair in this video.)

Scott Berkun, author of The Myths of Innovation adopts a similar attitude in this recent talk he did at Google HQ.



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