Yesterday, NPR had a feature on the copy machine’s 75th anniversary, celebrating this technology’s impact on the workplace.
Clayton Christensen, who coined the term ‘disruptive innovation,’ often uses the copy machine as an example of the innovator’s dilemma, such as in this 1995 Harvard Business Review article, and the 2011 interview excerpted below:
For example, when Canon disrupted Xerox, (Xerox’s) most important customers operated high-speed photocopy centers, and they needed even faster, ever more fully featured machines. These little tabletop copiers (from Canon) could do three or four copies a minute. They couldn’t collate; they couldn’t enlarge or reduce or do grayscale replication. But they made it so much simpler to make photocopies that many people actually had two copiers for a while. For the simple things, we had a little Canon around the corner from our office, and for the high-volume jobs, we still took the work to the corporate photocopy center.
Image Courtesy of -Marcus- / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
