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> Constraints, Fresh Starts, and Seoul
> 2010-09-17T13:26:00Z
>
> By Scott Anthony
>
> I've been in Seoul, South Korea for most of this week. It's my sixth
> journey here over the course of the past year, and I find I enjoy
> the city more with each visit. There's a vibrancy you feel walking
> down the streets, a sense that the country — which has achieved so
> much over the past four decades — is still on the up-swing.
>
> A visitor to Seoul can't help but notice technology's ubiquity. On
> the subway you'll see people watching high quality television on
> their handsets. The broadband speed at hotels puts the United States
> to shame. Sensors on escalators help to conserve energy by turning
> the escalator off when it is not being used. The toilets have more
> buttons than an Xbox controller (this is not hyperbole).
>
> Commenting on the broadband speed available here sparked, one
> colleague said to me, "It's so fast. I guess the U.S. just doesn't
> have the right government policy to support the deployment of high-
> speed Internet access."
>
> Key political differences may have helped Korea build world-class
> Internet infrastructure, but what also helped is the fact that
> constraints and fresh starts can be innovation rocket fuel.
>
> About half of South Korea's 50 million people live in the greater
> Seoul area. That constrained, contained population is a boon to
> certain forms of innovation, because it makes provisions of services
> much more economical, just as there are some business models that
> work well in Manhattan but nowhere else in the United States.
>
> My colleague Clayton Christensen served a two-year mission for his
> church in South Korea in the early 1970s. When he describes his time
> there, he always mentions two things. First, he talks about how he
> was highlighted in a newspaper as the tallest person in Korea.
> Second, he talks about the country's abject poverty. In the Korean
> edition of The Innovator's Guide to Growth, he wrote:
>
> "When I arrived, the country was deeply impoverished. I remember
> watching, for example, as workers building a new sports stadium in
> Pusan carried hand-mixed concrete up bamboo scaffolding in back
> packs," he wrote. "A few years ago I visited Mongolia, where my
> daughter Annie was serving a mission for our church. Mongolia is
> today one of the poorest countries in the world. But it is far more
> economically advanced than Korea was 30 years ago."
> It's hard to believe that when you look around the gleaming
> metropolis today. The advantage, of course, is that Seoul got to
> design the modern version of its city basically from the ground up.
> That means it has a modern, super-efficient subway system, roads
> that can go as wide as 10 lanes, and an underground infrastructure
> that is easier to upgrade than the tangled mess that lies beneath
> older cities.
>
> Incumbents don't have the luxury of making fresh starts, making it
> harder for them to master game-changing innovation. As an analogy,
> think about how easy it is for children to learn new languages. I've
> watched my four-year-old son pick up Chinese in our six months in
> Singapore. He doesn't have to unlearn anything to speak the
> language, so it's easy for him. I struggle because I have to de-
> program parts of my brain before I can learn.
>
> Still, there are three things a company can do to get some of fresh
> start benefits:
>
> Bring in outside perspectives. Outsiders help to ensure that
> companies don't end up mindlessly mimicking past behavior.
> Limit borrowing from the core business. Remember, every asset has a
> corresponding liability. I always advise companies to ask a simple
> question. "If an entrepreneur had access to a resource for free,
> would they take it?" If not, it's a good sign that you shouldn't
> "gift" your capability to an innovation venture.
> Impose constraints. Narrow budgets and tight time frames can force
> people to follow novel approaches because they have no other choice.
> If they follow these tenets, companies can get the best of both
> worlds, the resources of an incumbent that startups can only dream
> of, and the liberation that comes from fresh starts.
>
>
> Copyright © 2010 Harvard Business School Publishing. All rights
> reserved. Harvard Business Publishing is an affiliate of Harvard
> Business School.
>