Jobs, Productivity and the Great Decoupling Beginning of the 2000s , productivity growth and employment growth started to become decoupled from each other. By 2011, a significant gap appears between the two lines, showing economic growth with no parallel increase in job creation. Brynjolfsson and McAfee call it the “great decoupling.” And they are both confident that technology is behind both the healthy growth in productivity and the weak growth in jobs. Other economists find other plausible explanations to this slowness of job creation since the turn of the century, including events related to global trade and the financial crisis of the early and late 2000s. No one knows but for sure technology might strongly impact employment rate and recently vanished jobs might not come back. 
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Jobs, Productivity and the Great Decoupling

Beginning of the 2000s , productivity growth and employment growth started to become decoupled from each other. By 2011, a significant gap appears between the two lines, showing economic growth with no parallel increase in job creation.

Brynjolfsson and McAfee call it the “great decoupling.” And they are both confident that technology is behind both the healthy growth in productivity and the weak growth in jobs. Other economists find other plausible explanations to this slowness of job creation since the turn of the century, including events related to global trade and the financial crisis of the early and late 2000s. No one knows but for sure technology might strongly impact employment rate and recently vanished jobs might not come back. 

Source: technologyreview.com

Companies don’t want to innovate ?!?

Innovation may be an organization’s life blood, but still its success rate in most companies hovers at just 17%. Even innovation leader P&G succeeds less than 50% of the time. What prevents companies from innovating better?

  1. First managers need immediate results, often reinforced by short-term incentive plans or the regular expectation of earning improvements.
  2. Companies may also fear that innovation will cannibalize current business .
  3. Additionally, companies are often schooled in slow, continuous improvement. Approaches like Six Sigma have helped companies squeeze out inefficiencies, but also tend to reinforce existing processes with an eye towards doing them better. On the other hand, innovation requires messy experiments instead of methodical analysis.

Ron Ashkenas - Harvard Business Review

Source: blogs.hbr.org

Conjonctive products vs. disjontive products

Ingi Brown, Ph.D. student at Mines ParisTech, recently defended his thesis on ‘use-generative products’: products that engage and encourage a broad exploration of their uses. Ingi first differentiates two traditional models of products :

  • on the one hand products with a well-defined functional scope, such as the swiss army knife that addresses an algebra of different known use-case scenarios,
  • and on the other hand products that are designed by the end user. Such ‘lead-user’ design approaches, rely on highly-skilled users that enhance an unfinished good or an ‘open-ended’ product, for example in extreme sports (kite-surfing, mountain biking…).

Ingi proposes to consider an intermediary model where products are neither designed for one particular use-case, neither rely on highly competent users, but invite all the users to develop creative projects (for example products such as Raspberry Pi or the iPhone, services such as Twitter…).

Ingi elaborates his theory using the concepts of Conjunction and Disjunction. While conjonctive products offers well defined actions and value systems, disjunctive goods tend to give pending attributes and unexpected properties. The disjunctive power of some objects shape new relationships between actions and properties. The best exemple of disjunctive product is the Apple’s and Android APIs for smartphone. It is “structured empowerment”.

Source: innovationexcellence.com