Video
Contrasting Push and Pull
Push systems contrast starkly with pull ones (see exhibit below), particularly in their view of demand: the former treat it as foreseeable, the latter as highly uncertain. This difference in a basic premise leads to fundamentally different design principles. For instance, instead of dealing with uncertainty by tightening controls, as push systems would, pull models address immediate needs by expanding opportunities for local participants — employees and customers alike — to use their creativity. To exploit the opportunities that uncertainty presents, pull models help people come together and innovate by drawing on a growing array of specialized and distributed resources.
Rather than seeking to constrain the range of resources available to participants, pull models constantly strive to expand it while helping participants to find the most relevant options. Rather than seeking to dictate the actions of participants, pull models give even people on the periphery the tools and resources (including connections to other people) needed to take the initiative and to address opportunities creatively as they arise. Rather than treating producers as passive consumers whose needs can be anticipated and shaped by centralized decision makers, pull models treat people as networked creators even when they actually are customers purchasing goods and services. Pull platforms harness their participants' passion, commitment, and desire to learn, thereby creating communities that can improvise and innovate rapidly.
The open-source world isn't the only niche community where this kind of learning and innovation now take place. The world of rare books, for instance, has been turned upside down by Amazon's ability to aggregate the offerings of many local special-interest sellers; customers are no longer constrained by the quirky collections of titles assembled by owners of antiquarian bookshops in out-of-the-way physical locations. In extreme sports such as surfing and windsurfing, participants increasingly innovate and co-create new offerings, such as footholds on windsurfing boards to enhance wave jumping. And customized cars, or hot rods — automobiles modified to suit individual tastes — rank among the fastest-growing segments of the North American automobile market. In each of these cases, consumers are becoming more engaged in the creative and commercial processes.
Co-creation is a powerful engine for innovation: instead of limiting it to what companies can devise within their own borders, pull systems throw the process open to many diverse participants, whose input can take product and service offerings in unexpected directions that serve a much broader range of needs. Instant-messaging networks, for instance, were initially marketed to teens as a way to communicate more rapidly, but financial traders, among many other people, now use them to gain an edge in rapidly moving financial markets.
How to Pull
The benefits of pull systems should by now be clear: enhanced innovation, increased opportunity for collaboration, closer relationships with customers and suppliers, more rapid feedback, richer reflection on the results of distributed experimentation, and greater scalability, for example. In our view, however, the essential reason to begin implementing pull systems is the fact that they help companies to secure deeper sources of competitive advantage at a time when the traditional sources are disappearing. Although a comprehensive exploration of the way big corporations can assemble pull systems is beyond the scope of this article, several areas of focus are worth highlighting.
Use metaphors to deepen understanding. Push models are typically based on programs — an image that conjures up thick and tightly scripted manuals, standardized curricula, the offerings of network television, and software. By contrast, pull approaches tend to work on platforms, a word suggesting a more open-ended design, to accommodate the changing needs of participants. The right image is conveyed by Expedia's travel service or a hospital's emergency ward.
These platforms are invariably modular to help make resources and activities more accessible and flexible. Instead of being rigidly specified, as in push systems, the modular elements are "loosely coupled": they can be joined easily, without friction or customization, and just as easily disassembled and reassembled. Interfaces show users the contents of the module and how to access it. A module might, for instance, consist of a business partner or partners (as in Li & Fung's global process network) or of a specialized tool (such as a radio telescope or an electron microscope that can be operated remotely through standardized interfaces).
Understand the spectrum. Pull platforms and push programs are not mutually exclusive. Li & Fung's global process network is a highly flexible pull platform, for example, yet many apparel producers participating in it organize their own resources in the traditional top-down way. Amazon and eBay use pull models to help consumers gain access to books produced by traditional push programs, but pull distribution systems are now creating opportunities to reconfigure the production process through publishing on demand.
Reader Comments» Post a comment