Category design is a business strategy and discipline that helps companies create, develop, and dominate new categories of products and services.
Category design extends beyond a leadership team's narrower focus on products, company culture and business models. Taught in academia as a business and market strategy, [1] [2] it is explicitly deployed by disruptive innovation companies like Uber, Airbnb and other start up brands. [3] [4] [5] Business magazines such as Harvard Business Review and Inc. have published articles on the value of category design. [6] [7] [8] Marc Benioff is an aficionado. [9]
In academic terms, category design fits within research on the dynamics of product and market categories, [10] [11] [12] [13] such as the historical emergence of new categories [14] [15] [16] vs. entrepreneurial efforts to valorize a new category of product or market. [17] [18] Different forms of gatekeeping are also relevant to categories of markets and products, from critics who determine which books are deemed to belong to a genre, [19] to art gallerists who decide which customers are worthy to buy a high value artwork. [20]
Category design was first proposed in the book Play Bigger. [21] The book lays out a justification for why category creation is an important strategy, [22] and includes a step-by-step guide to applying design thinking to category creation: [23]
The concepts tie back into recent writings about how our brains work, particularly cognitive biases as described by Daniel Kahneman. [25] Good category takes advantage of cognitive biases such as the choice supportive bias and groupthink bias.
After the book was published in June 2016, Mike Maples, a founding partner of Floodgate, published articles supporting the concept. [26]
The book, "Play Bigger" was co-authored by Christopher Lochhead, Dave Peterson, Al Ramadan, and Kevin Maney. [21]
Data research shows that "category kings" (companies that dominates a market category) [27] that go public when they are between six and ten years old create most of the value among all VC-funded tech companies. Companies that go public sooner than six years old often lose value; companies that IPO after ten years old create little value for shareholders. The reason is thought to be that categories take around six years to develop, and most of a category's growth happens in that six to ten year timeframe. After ten years, a category is established and growth slows, so share prices level off. [28] [1] This was discussed in a Harvard Business Review article titled "How Unicorns Grow". [29]
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: CS1 maint: others (
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Category design is a business strategy and discipline that helps companies create, develop, and dominate new categories of products and services.
Category design extends beyond a leadership team's narrower focus on products, company culture and business models. Taught in academia as a business and market strategy, [1] [2] it is explicitly deployed by disruptive innovation companies like Uber, Airbnb and other start up brands. [3] [4] [5] Business magazines such as Harvard Business Review and Inc. have published articles on the value of category design. [6] [7] [8] Marc Benioff is an aficionado. [9]
In academic terms, category design fits within research on the dynamics of product and market categories, [10] [11] [12] [13] such as the historical emergence of new categories [14] [15] [16] vs. entrepreneurial efforts to valorize a new category of product or market. [17] [18] Different forms of gatekeeping are also relevant to categories of markets and products, from critics who determine which books are deemed to belong to a genre, [19] to art gallerists who decide which customers are worthy to buy a high value artwork. [20]
Category design was first proposed in the book Play Bigger. [21] The book lays out a justification for why category creation is an important strategy, [22] and includes a step-by-step guide to applying design thinking to category creation: [23]
The concepts tie back into recent writings about how our brains work, particularly cognitive biases as described by Daniel Kahneman. [25] Good category takes advantage of cognitive biases such as the choice supportive bias and groupthink bias.
After the book was published in June 2016, Mike Maples, a founding partner of Floodgate, published articles supporting the concept. [26]
The book, "Play Bigger" was co-authored by Christopher Lochhead, Dave Peterson, Al Ramadan, and Kevin Maney. [21]
Data research shows that "category kings" (companies that dominates a market category) [27] that go public when they are between six and ten years old create most of the value among all VC-funded tech companies. Companies that go public sooner than six years old often lose value; companies that IPO after ten years old create little value for shareholders. The reason is thought to be that categories take around six years to develop, and most of a category's growth happens in that six to ten year timeframe. After ten years, a category is established and growth slows, so share prices level off. [28] [1] This was discussed in a Harvard Business Review article titled "How Unicorns Grow". [29]
{{
cite book}}
: CS1 maint: others (
link)