"Apple Inc. Chief Executive Tim Cook has said the company’s greatest contribution to mankind will be in health. So far, some Apple initiatives aimed at broadly disrupting the healthcare sector have struggled to gain traction, according to people familiar with them and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal." - Rolfe Winkler, The Wall Street Journal, June 16, 2021
This represents the usual situation of a business reaching out of the box. For any number of reasons it fails. Of course, the party line in BigTech is that failure is good. The organization learns from it.
However, failure looks bad. That can damage the brand, demoralize the workforce, shake organizational self-confidence and even in some kind of voodoo way set the company up for more failure.
In contrast to Appple, prominent law firm Wilson Sonsini also went out of the box. That was creating "products." That has been through its subsidiary SixFifty. In Bloomberg Law, Roy Strom reports:
"[Wilson Sonsini] launched SixFifty in 2019, making it one of the few top 100 U.S. firms invested in automating repetitive aspects of the law for clients. Its initial product helped companies respond to a California data privacy law, and pulled in nearly $4 million in revenue during its first six months on the market ..."
Among SixFifty's other "products" is a digital employee handbook providing information about the laws for all 50 states.
This innovation has not only produced a new profit center for Wilson Sonsini. It has enhanced its branding. In addition, it enables it to diversify beyond practicing law per se.
Sure, innovation, especially disrupting a market, is the meme of these times. Pursuing it can be high reward. But it also is hight risk.
Businessses focused on exiting their usual box should analyze how Wilson Sonsini went about it. A top business school should do a case study about why Apple stumbled in the health niche.
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