Innoveracy
New Shapes of Innovation, The Firm, and Ignorance.
👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of #technology, #business, #design, and #culture.
📚 Reading
Shein: The TikTok of Ecommerce
It feels crazy to make the comparison, but Shein combines parts of Apple and Amazon to build its compounding advantage. Like Apple, it controls its entire value chain, from the factory floor to the Shein app. Building a strong brand and user experience should allow it to charge premium prices, like Apple, but instead, it chooses to consistently delight customers through lower prices, like Amazon.
👩🏻🔬 The TikTok of Innovation—Not Boring
The Passion Economy and Its Hidden Currency:
When I look at promising passion economy startups… What I’m really interested in is companies that are inviting new participants into types of creative work that had been previously inaccessible to people. So they’re enfranchising a new segment of the population to do some type of work that hadn’t really been easy or available to them before [..] you’re taking people from zero to one…
👨🎨 Behold the nature of the new firm—NfX
Innoveracy: Misunderstanding Innovation
[A] form of ignorance which seems to be universal: the inability to understand the concept and role of innovation. The way this is exhibited is in the misuse of the term and the inability to discern the difference between novelty, creation, invention and innovation. The result is a failure to understand the causes of success and failure in business and hence the conditions that lead to economic growth.
🧑🚒 Ignore at your peril—Asymco
🎧 Listening
Identifying Legendary Start-ups:
I find it really useful to think about the business as a set of systems. And it's both the set of systems that make the business work and the set of systems that it sits in, such as the broader market and even the economy and society [..] It's like a vantage point problem: it's challenging to zoom out and take the 50,000-foot view and comprehend all of these systems and how they work together.
Josh Buckley—Invest Like the Best
Technology & Finance:
It seems that some parts of the European Economy are not just stable but inevitable. There are all these companies in Germany, Italy, and France that are in various parts of various supply chains totally unassailable [..] So, we should be asking ourselves: do we think that Ford, and Amazon, and Intel, and these other great American companies are going to be able to be multi-generation leaders?
Byrne Hobart—European Straits (Apple, Spotify)
One on One with A and Z #8:
The Internet is as if everyone on the planet now has some level of read-write access to everyone else's mind [..] And that's new. Maybe the metaphor is we moved from batch processing of access to people's mind to interactive access. This level of real-time, simultaneous, fast cycle, read-write access to people's minds is a new thing.
Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz—a16z
📬 Suggestions?
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