Lessons from the Curious Spread of an Ancient Platform Innovation
Ezra W. Zuckerman Sivan Alvin J. Siteman (1948) Professor of Entrepreneurship and Strategy, MIT
This presentation distills lessons from my book manuscript The First Week, which is to be completed in the next 12 months. The book focuses on a very unusual innovation: the seven-day week. The week isn't usually thought of as akin to a market or technology platform, but it-- like the calendar-- is indeed a temporal platform-- a way of organizing time that allows and encourages dedicated "applications" (i.e., activities and routines) to be "written" (i.e., scheduled) on it. Also, while we don't usually think of the week as an innovation, it in fact has the hallmarks of an especially difficult innovation: It was invented just once and spread in a way that is distinctive of innovations that must be experienced by a critical mass in society before they are adopted. Thus, even though week-observing communities arrived in China starting in the 8th century, it was only in the mid-19th century (beginning with the treaty ports in Japan) that the week began to be adopted in East Asia. Some of the lessons relevant to managers who want their innovations to get widely adopted are as follows: a) How important it is that early adopters be mobile, in that they take the innovation to new contexts where it might get more traction; b) How important it is that the minority of early-adopters be highly committed so as to reach a critical mass; c) How it can sometimes be unimportant that the innovation solves critical problems for the majority, just as long as it is sufficiently beneficial to adjust to the minority; d) How quickly an innovation that was long uninteresting can come to be taken for granted and naturalized; and e) The importance of platform thinking in non-technological domains.