The Next Next Common Sense
There is, however, one curtain which most of us construct all the time, and which a good manager tries to take down—the curtain which prevents us from seeing the functionality of a component as a component in itself. Functionality is an Important Component Think of the IKEA experience. You can go to the warehouse of this furniture company and help select the actual piece of stock you will take home. Delivery is not an issue—you take it with you. How do you know it is properly assembled? Of course it is, you’ve done it yourself. And if it isn’t, you’ve only yourself to blame. At the same time, the store needs fewer stock clerks, fewer delivery people, no assembly workers. Funny how much money a store can make by seeing things a bit differently. In the digital era, this concept has expanded dramatically. Companies now routinely unbundle and rebundle functionality across physical and digital domains. Consider how ride-sharing platforms separated the func- tionality of “driving” from “owning a car,” or how streaming services sep- arated “watching content” from “owning media,” or how cloud computing separated “using computing resources” from “maintaining infrastructure.” IKEA itself has evolved this approach by separating the “design func- tionality” from physical production through its online planning tools, allowing customers to configure spaces virtually before committing to purchases. They’ve also expanded into subscription models for certain product lines, separating “access to furniture” from “ownership of furni- ture”—a fundamental recombination of traditional retail components. A more recent example is Airbnb, which recognized that “hospitality” could be separated from “hotel ownership.” This insight allowed them to create a platform that connects property owners with travelers, unbun- dling the traditional hotel business model into distinct functional compo- nents. Their subsequent expansion into “Experiences” further unbundled “local knowledge” from “tour guide certification,” enabling anyone with specialized knowledge to monetize it directly.
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