Action at the Edge

Umair Haque writes for an awesome blog called Bubblegeneration.   I am a huge believer in bottom-up thinking/acting and am in violent agreement with Umair's line of reasoning.  In essence, he believes that in order to compete effectively in today's markets, you need to capture and leverage all the activity that's happening with your product/service out on the edges, in the field, where users really make it their own.  Top down approaches where the uber-corporation knows best are obsolete and suffer, as a result, from what he calls "strategy decay" and he lists many examples.  Here's a quote from a recent post called " Core vs Edge, Pt 18849" (no permalink available - come'on Umair!) that captures what I'm talking about.

What happens at the intersection of global hypercompetition, maturity, and shifting consumer needs?

If you're pursuing a core strategy, you consolidate.

Of course, this is a strategy which is utterly out of sync with exactly the economic pressures listed above in the first place. It's a strategy which dominates the industrial economics of scale and scope in mass production.

What Detroit needs are edge strategies, focused around deconstructing value chains, achieving hyperefficiency (vs simple cost-sharing), and shifting control to customers.

Think how the most simple shift to decentralization - kaizen - revolutionized autos in the 80s/90s.

Eric von Hippel also has a web site that provides great analysis on how individual consumers can (and do) radically change the basis of competition and turn upside down our normal thinking on how products can/should come to market.  You'll never equate DIY with home improvement and handymen ever again.

I highly recommend reading everything these guys write if you're at all interested in how and why market power is moving inexorably into the hands of the customer.