How the Age of Tweaking Impacts Hotel Operations

One of the better articles I read among the avalanche of tributes and rebukes after Steve Job’s passing was Malcolm Gladwell's "The Tweaker" in the New Yorker (free access). In essence, Gladwell distilled Job’s talent as that of being a master tweaker, who was compelled to make what already existed better, such as the ordinary digital music player which became the superior iPod, or a chunky Microsoft tablet PC, which Jobs tweaked into the sleek iPad.

But what was actually more interesting to me in this article was how Gladwell spelled out the clear distinction between inventor and tweaker. It’s not rocket science, but reading it I realized that we indeed live in the Age of Tweaking, rather than in the Age of Invention.

I took this concept to a recent conference here in Hong Kong, The World Research Summit for Tourism, where I was, sadly, the lone industry speaker among 300 or so academics from all over the world. The gist of my presentation was that in the Age of Tweaking, the underlying technology becomes more important than ever.

The above diagram shows how media platforms and innovation have evolved over the past 120 years or so. What you can see clearly here is that the media landscape has changed more in the past 5 years than it had the 100 years before that. And as we were heading towards the end of the 20^th century, content increasingly started to migrate across different media networks and platforms, including the TV mobile, web or even games platforms. So why is that? It’s because we have moved from the Age of Invention, to the Age of Tweaking. The TV was an invention, but the connected TV is a monumental tweak of the underlying invention.

When you look at how long it took for entertainment devices to gain a market share of 50 million, you’ll get a picture like this:

What’s striking is that from the point the internet went mainstream, the tweaking of communication accelerated and adoption of new applications climbed to unprecedented levels, as witnessed by Facebook and Twitter’s subscriber explosion. It’s clear that the internet created an environment of building blocks that gave new meaning to Product Life Cycle 101: Tweaking, which builds on something that is already familiar, makes adoption much easier than something that is invented from scratch and has to be heavily marketed to build familiarity and adoption.

So in other words: the more you tweak, the quicker the adoption and faster commercial gains.

Looking at some of the recent inventions that did not get off the ground underlines this. Time Magazine a while ago published a list of the worst inventions of all times, which contains some poignant examples of how invention can fail despite a brilliant and complex technology.  The Segway people mover is a classic example. I wonder if it failed because, as a new invention, it was too much of a stretch for people to learn how to use it. Who knows if we might see the technology emerge in another form, sometime in the future, with a bit of creative tweaking. 

Let’s look at what actually happened when the internet entered the mainstream. I’m not talking about being able to Google something or send emails. I am talking about Internet Protocol as a delivery technology. IP has touched all industries and walks of life because of its more adaptive attributes, lower networking, equipment and administration costs, centralized network control and management and better communications capabilities, productivity and flexibility. These advantages are particularly important for a hotel operation that has to handle many different technologies efficiently, including energy, security and communication.

In fact, IP is probably the king of tweakable technologies, because of its flexibility and capability which is why it will remain the key enabler of technology delivery for the foreseeable future. The important part here is that the underlying technology platform comes first, applications second. If you have a powerful enough technology platform that can be tweaked to accommodate future needs, you will be able to accommodate the next wave of tweaked applications as they enter the mainstream. Don’t forget, predictions put the number of connected devices in the market in the coming years in the trillions and China alone will have nearly 5 billion connected devices by 2020.

So as time to market for technology innovation continues to contract dramatically, hotels more than ever have to be flexible. But innovation is set to be facilitated by tweaking rather than inventing, so it’s important to focus on the underlying technology that will support tweaked technologies. With IP, we have a very robust technology now, and hoteliers should focus on the knowledge and technology available today to lay the foundations for the future. A robust technology will enable adding new applications in the future without major investment and with short time frames.