experience curve Concepts

The Art of Profitability

by Adrian Slywotzky · 31 Aug 2002

17: Cycle Profit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .111 Lesson 18: After-Sale Profit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .119 Lesson 19: New Product Profit . . . . . . . . . . . . .124 Lesson 20: Relative Market Share Profit . . . . . .133 Lesson 21: Experience Curve Profit . . . . . . . . . .140 Lesson 22: Low-Cost Business Design Profit . .145 Lesson 23: Digital Profit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .149 List of readings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .156 2 THE ART OF PROFITABILITY Request

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that haven’t been profiled yet.” “So what’s left to go?” “The next model is Experience Curve Profit. Do you know the experience curve?” “Yes, a little.” “That’s good. You know, it’s funny. The experience curve is about one percent of the business school curriculum today. Back in the 1970s, it used to

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’t. Zhao let him go. But he continued to worry about it for the next hour and a half. 139 THE ART OF PROFITABILITY 21 Experience Curve Profit April 19. Steve showed up precisely on time, bleary-eyed, rumpled, but with an attitude. He’d completed Zhao’s exercise, and he thought

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—what W. Edwards Deming would call constancy of purpose—was the key. But the initial breakthrough in insight and in attitude came from applying the experience curve idea.” “We don’t run into it much today,” Steve offered. “You’re right. It’s seen as old-fashioned.” “But in a lot of

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?” “You already know the answer.” “Another profit paradox.” “Sadly, yes. I can’t explain it, only report it. However, I should point out that the experience curve is potentially a very dangerous idea,” Zhao continued. “How so?” “That’s exactly what you’re going to tell me . . . next week.” “All right, all

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. “There’s one thing that’s bothering me.” “Only one?” Zhao laughed. “Well, for now,” Steve smiled. “What’s that?” “What’s the difference between experience curve profit and relative market share profit? They’re both about being the biggest, aren’t they?” Zhao was taken aback, even slightly annoyed. But he

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. “Now let’s imagine a consumer products firm that specializes in luxury goods. Here the cost of goods is twenty percent. You can do great experience curve cost management on that twenty percent, but that won’t be enough to win. “If you’re twice as large as your biggest competitor, you

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Welch. If you’re so smart, tell me how you managed with your assignment from last time. Did you figure out the danger in the experience curve?” “I think so.” “Let’s have it then.” “I think it goes something like this. I tried to imagine an organization completely and devoutly focused

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on experience curve cost management. Concentrating on every element of cost, graphing up the cost per unit over time, cost per unit versus cumulative experience, and so on

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your radar screen goes dead completely. “Conversely, put your radar screen on maximum, and your microscope becomes completely foggy, completely out of focus.” “So the experience curve danger is . . . ?” “It’s like having the microscope on maximum power. You lose your peripheral vision completely.” “And what happens at the edge of the

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need two organizations.” “Again?” Zhao chided. “That was your answer for After-Sale Profit.” “I stand by my story. You might need two organizations. The experience-curve demons and the blank-sheet-of-paper gang. Think of it as maximizing your current hand while simultaneously buying a big insurance policy on the

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base, de facto standard, after-sale Time profit, new product profit, specialty product Relative market share, local leadership Blockbuster, transaction scale Multi-component, profit multiplier Experience curve, specialization Zhao examined the list and nodded. “That’s it,” he said approvingly. “If we were to continue, I’d ask you to describe the

Corporate Finance: Theory and Practice

by Pierre Vernimmen, Pascal Quiry, Maurizio Dallocchio, Yann le Fur and Antonio Salvi · 16 Oct 2017 · 1,544pp · 391,691 words

far as possible. Market share is a key success factor since higher sales volumes help keep down unit costs (see Boston Consulting Group’s famous experience curve, which shows that unit costs fall by 20% when total production volumes double in size). This is where engineers and financial controllers are most at

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solar panels, which enabled it to take a lion’s share of its market, or as a consultant would put it, to move down its experience curve, but which was also the source of its collapse in 2013. The leverage effect sheds light on the origins of return on equity, i.e

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nature of the relationship has elicited some criticism. Nevertheless, in the majority of cases, all sectors can be characterised at a given time by an experience curve on which companies are found at a more or less low level. This type of relationship highlights the importance of the company’s growth rate

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from entering the market (e.g. Internet search engines). This model holds especially true for sectors that are undergoing rapid development. Over and above the experience curve, researchers have also observed that an innovation or a new strategic activity field will result in phased growth. The growth rate is initially low, then

The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion

by John Hagel Iii and John Seely Brown · 12 Apr 2010 · 319pp · 89,477 words

within environments that unleash the potential for increasing returns. In fact, these creation spaces may change the way the “experts” look at business strategy. The “experience curve,” first popularized by Boston Consulting Group in the late 1960s, has proved remarkably accurate in describing how performance improves in industries as diverse as semiconductors

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, toilet paper, and beer. It has been a foundation of business strategy for decades. Yet in all these industries experience curves are also diminishing returns curves—the more experience an industry accumulates, the longer it will take to accumulate enough experience to deliver a comparable increment

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vary, ranging anywhere from about a 10 percent to a 30 percent reduction in cost with each doubling in performance. Rebranding this concept as “the experience curve,” BCG spelled out the wide-ranging implications of this relationship for business strategy, including the economic importance of market share and the opportunity to build

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balanced portfolios of business initiatives to effectively leverage the economics of the experience curve. The idea caught on in a big way among the large corporations that dominated our twentieth-century push economy. Thanks to the

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experience curve, managers could now conceptualize a relationship between the size and the efficiency of their operations: The bigger a given operation got, the more efficient it

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became. Scalable efficiency soon became something of a secular religion, with the experience curve as its creed. Consistent with the focus on scalable efficiency, the experience curve measured cost reduction as the key dimension of performance. It was simple and powerful. But it had one troublesome characteristic

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. Every experience curve was in the end a diminishing returns curve. The more experience accumulated in a specific industry, the longer it took to get the next increment

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to compete with the core—their best hope was to carve out a sustainable but much smaller niche, where they could harness their own experience-curve advantage. The experience curve was the ultimate vindication of push institutions in a push economy. As for individuals, they had to fit into institutions and adapt to the

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time in history we may have the opportunity to transform diminishing-returns performance curves into increasing-returns performance curves. We begin by discussing the famous experience curve that describes how firms in the twentieth century improved their performance and the stress that these traditional approaches generated in a world of increasing performance

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we all experience into compelling opportunities that can help us to create and capture more and more value. A NEW IMPERATIVE In the world of experience curves and diminishing returns, office politics were about as lively as things ever got, for most people at least. But the lack of excitement seemed an

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space, the more performance improvement rises. Creation spaces provide the conditions necessary for increasing returns to performance improvement rather than the diminishing returns of the experience curve. THE NEW CREATION SPACES Most of the creation spaces that exist today emerged and evolved on the edges of culture and society—even though several

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ways that creation-space organizers influence and focus the behavior of participants. THE POTENTIAL FOR COLLABORATION CURVES Earlier in this chapter we highlighted how the experience curve came to symbolize twentieth-century thinking about performance improvement. The bigger your business operation became, according to this thinking, the more cost-efficient you became

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only squeeze costs so much until they finally reach a point of diminishing returns. We now have the chance to transcend the limitations of the experience curve. The more participants one adds to carefully designed creation spaces—and the more the interactions that occur between and among them—the greater the chances

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will get better quicker at whatever it is they’re doing. Rather than each new increment of experience contributing less and less—as in the experience curve—each new participant in a creation space makes all the previous participants—and interactions between them—incrementally more valuable. A virtuous cycle begins to emerge

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upward when more participants join and when the interactions between the participants increase. Collaboration curves are a reversal of the diminishing-returns dynamics of the experience curve, delivering increasing returns to performance instead. What do we mean by increasing returns? The idea of network effects provides a useful starting point. The fax

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Definition Group Enterprise Social Media Experiment (ESME) Environments of creation spaces increasing encounters of people with shared passions serendipitous Exception handling using social-media tools Experience curves as diminishing returns curves diminishing returns of with scalable efficiency tradition transcended by collaboration curves Explicit knowledge contrasted to tacit knowledge Exposing surfaces Facebook becomes

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Strike Payne, Lisa Payne, Wendell Peres, Shimon Perez, Carlota Performance declines of corporations Performance improvement in digital infrastructures driven, increased, by new knowledge flows and experience curves through pull techniques Performance measures. See also Rewards and incentives Pezman, Steve Platforms accommodating diverse providers, resource users activities allowed by connection (see Connection platforms

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(SDN) as connection platform creation and launch of with evidence of collaboration curves Scalability of access Scalable efficiency during Depression ensures government intervention, protection with experience curve measuring cost reduction and need to shift to scalable learning Scalable learning as new rationale for institutions and scalable efficiency shaped by individuals Scalise, George

Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think

by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund · 2 Apr 2018 · 288pp · 85,073 words

B, June 24, 2013. DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2012.0137. http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/368/1623/20120137. Lafond, F., et al. “How well do experience curves predict technological progress? A method for making distributional forecasts.” Navigant Research. 2017. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.05979.pdf. Larson, Heidi J., et al. “The

Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet

by Varun Sivaram · 2 Mar 2018 · 469pp · 132,438 words

in Photovoltaics,” Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters 4, no. 6 (2013): 908–918, doi:10.1021/jz400052e. 41. Francois Lafond et al., “How Well Do Experience Curves Predict Technological Progress? A Method for Making Distributional Forecasts,” Journal of Technological Forecasting and Social Change. In Press. 2017, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.05979

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the technology development process, the U.S. Department of Energy’s strategy for energy innovation involves the promotion of research, development, and demonstration (RD&D). Experience curve A graphical illustration of the industrial principle that increased production of a product or delivery of a service leads to lower unit costs of the

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solar PV production in, 44–45 supergrids involving, 196, 198, 205–206 YieldCos in, 93–94, 97 European Union, 77, 241 EVs. See Electric vehicles Experience curve, 289g Exxon, 34, 35, 87 Facebook, 28 Falling-particle receivers, 188 Farms, solar, xiii–xiv, 14 Feed-in tariffs, 36, 50, 57, 240, 281g Feynman

Making Sense of Chaos: A Better Economics for a Better World

by J. Doyne Farmer · 24 Apr 2024 · 406pp · 114,438 words

law for technological change. There is a much older law for technological improvement that goes under a variety of names, including learning by doing, the experience curve and Wright’s law. This law was originally postulated in 1936 by Theodore Wright, who has an interesting background. He was the brother of both

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: Yale University Press. Lafond, François, Aimee Gotway Bailey, Jan David Bakker, Dylan Rebois, Rubina Zadourian, Patrick McSharry and J. Doyne Farmer. 2018. ‘How Well Do Experience Curves Predict Technological Progress? A Method for Making Distributional Forecasts’. Technological Forecasting and Social Change 128: 104–117, doi: 10.1016/j.techfore.2017.11.001

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, 2009) 17 EURACE model 257 European Central Bank 2, 50, 188 evolution, theory of 7, 176–9, 183, 188–9 excess profits 180–81, 198 experience curve 239 experiments 6, 28 agent-based models and 278 behavioral economics and 103–4, 106, 110, 115 chaos 33, 36 counterfactual 87–8 fluid-turbulence

Nothing but Net: 10 Timeless Stock-Picking Lessons From One of Wall Street’s Top Tech Analysts

by Mark Mahaney · 9 Nov 2021 · 311pp · 90,172 words

approaches to sizing market opportunities. Finally, large TAMs can help drive growth that can lead to scale, which has intrinsic benefits in the form of experience curves, unit economics advantages, competitive moats, and network effects. Scale wins. And large TAMs increase the opportunities for companies to tap into these scale benefits. Total

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quarter century of observing companies that clearly achieved scale and those that didn’t. First, scale can provide benefits in the form of experience curves. Per Wikipedia, learning or experience curve effects express the relationship between experience producing a good and the efficiency of that production. I’ll simplify that as follows—the more

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for the best media offerings. Large TAMs can help drive growth that can lead to scale, which has intrinsic benefits. There are four specific benefits: experience curves, unit economics advantages, competitive moats, and network effects. With scale come the learning opportunities to operate better/smarter, with scale come the opportunities to operate

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facing a much bigger market than appeared at first listen. Large TAMs can help drive growth that can lead to scale, which has intrinsic benefits: experience curves, unit economics advantages, competitive moats, and network effects. Lesson 7: Follow the Value Prop, Not the Money Follow the consumer value proposition. Some of the

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Store (Stone), 206 Expedia: as competition, 31, 90 during Covid-19 pandemic, 17, 303 earnings call, 221 learning, from Priceline, 168 as tech stock, 3 Experience curves, 168 Exxon Mobil, 6 Facebook (FB): acquisitions of, 80 AWS used by, 118 competition for, 309 during Covid-19 pandemic, 303 dislocation periods of, 263

The Firm

by Duff McDonald · 1 Jun 2014 · 654pp · 120,154 words

Boston Consulting Group was on a roll. In addition to his four-box matrix, Henderson had recently added a second weapon to his arsenal: the experience curve. Its purpose was to help clients see how costs go down systematically along with experience and market share. For each doubling of experience, the curve

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been asleep at the wheel. McKinsey had never imagined that its sophisticated clients could be sold “products” such as the growth-share matrix and the experience curve. Under Bower’s lead, the firm had deliberately avoided flavor-of-the-month ideas, thinking that its clientele wanted smart people, not smartly packaged ideas

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both. Black & Decker was a typical BCG client of the time, wrote Walter Kiechel in The Lords of Strategy. By using the tools of the experience curve—both analyzing and predicting costs—the consumer product maker took its circular saw business from 50,000 units to 600,000 units, a result of

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don’t want to be a solution in search of a problem, and that’s what the four-box matrix was. That’s what the experience curve was. Sometimes they worked. And sometimes they didn’t.”12 Gluck continued: “I said we should forget about trying to do what BCG did. That

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: of Bower, 66, 94, 100, 138, 277 of Daniel, 277 McKinsey power structure and, 121 executive compensation, 65–66, 82, 105, 121, 248, 302, 334 experience curve, BCG, 109, 110 Export-Import Bank, 80 Facebook, 327, 334 Falvey, Mary, 106 Farr, Chuck, 182 Farrell, Diana, 218, 284, 290–91 Fastow, Andy, 241

The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite

by Duff McDonald · 24 Apr 2017 · 827pp · 239,762 words

extent, this reflected the influence of newer, sexier ideas that appealed as much to impressionable young MBAs as to clients. BCG founder Bruce Henderson’s “experience curve” and “growth-share matrix” were all the rage in consulting. And whereas McKinsey self-consciously avoided talking about its competitors, they did not return the

The Switch: How Solar, Storage and New Tech Means Cheap Power for All

by Chris Goodall · 6 Jul 2016 · 271pp · 79,367 words

record for this book is available from the British Library. eISBN 978 1 782832485 Contents Introduction Cheap solar changes everything Chapter 1 Inevitable solar: the experience curve Chapter 2 Predictions and the global switch Chapter 3 New generation solar advances Chapter 4 When the sun doesn’t shine Chapter 5 Demand and

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and I have therefore provided links to these on my website, for ease of use. Please see: www.carboncommentary.com Chapter 1 Inevitable solar: the experience curve No talk about energy is complete without the speaker noting that the sun gives us enough power in less than an hour to provide the

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a total of 2,000 had been made the cost would be $7.50 per unit. Bruce Henderson, the founder of BCG, called this the ‘experience curve’ and his company later showed that the cost declines arising from this effect were pervasive across different industries, countries and time. Although the rate of

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cost reductions tends to be fastest in products that are manufactured using automated processes in large factories, the experience curve phenomenon can also be seen in office-based or even agricultural activities. The speed of the decline varies from fractions of one per cent for

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fell from about $100 million in 2001 to around $2,000 in 2015. That is roughly equivalent to a 60 per cent slope on the experience curve. We’d be wrong to imagine that BCG consultants were the first people to notice the impact of the accumulated number of units produced on

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in the quality of the finished item). That progress would continue over further units, although the improvements would tend to get smaller. That’s an ‘experience curve’ in BCG’s language. In the Introduction, I mentioned Peter Eisenberger, the man who led Exxon’s investigation in the 1980s into the prospects for

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to suggest that the passage of time drives the improvements. But the cost reductions that we have seen could equally be explained by a steep experience curve and the very rapid expansion in the numbers of transistors manufactured. For the last half century commentators have questioned whether manufacturing cost improvements can continue

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at the end of each year since 1976. Although the speed of fall varies from period to period, the slope matches a 20 per cent experience curve over the course of the last forty years. Source: Creative Commons Swanson’s Law tracks the cost of solar PV modules. The cost of solar

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standard wisdom for some time. Back in 2004, a group of Dutch and German researchers exhaustively discussed the evidence for the experience curve for photovoltaics. Their conclusion was clear-cut. The solar experience curve existed and the rate was somewhere between 20–23 per cent. If anything, they concluded, it was increasing over time

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resilience of this figure over more than three decades makes the eventual dominance of solar power a near-inevitability). Other studies have compared the PV experience curve to the declines seen in the cost of onshore wind power. Here, the degree of cost reduction appears to run at about 8 per cent

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world is going to use nuclear power instead of solar, it will have to find a way of getting plant construction on to a similar experience curve to solar. Since the first civilian nuclear power station in the world was built in Lancashire in the mid-1950s, this has never happened. Even

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growth may enable us to achieve close to zero emissions sufficiently soon to avoid the worst impact of climate change. If we assume that an experience curve of 20 per cent slope continues to apply – and I can see reason why not – then the cost of PV in a world of 40

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in late 2015 to as low as 15 US cents in 2041. (The faster the growth, the quicker the cost of solar declines, if the experience curve continues.) The crucial impact of this is that the implicit cost of electricity produced by solar PV in 2015, assuming an interest rate of 6

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thing is that a continuation of the trends of the last decades (40 per cent annual growth and a 20 per cent slope on the experience curve) can get the world free of fossil fuels within about thirty years. If world energy demand doesn’t rise as fast as I have assumed

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result in premature deaths, PV makes straightforward and hard-headed financial sense. It may be obvious but the key reason for all this is the experience curve. The more rapid the growth of output of an industry, whether it be semiconductors, mobile phones, LED lights or solar panels, the faster the rate

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policy priority, the rational thing would be to back the continued rapid growth of PV panel production and installation to get the benefits of the experience curve as quickly as we can. (Later on in the book, I’ll argue for a focus on further research into the improved conversion of solar

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light into liquid fuels as a second priority.) Perhaps, like me, you find the extraordinary impact of fast growth combined with a steep experience curve difficult to comprehend. How can it be possible to get from 1 per cent of all energy requirements to close to 100 per cent in

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with forecasting the speed of cost decline. In the 2004 Dutch/German study I mentioned on p. 22, the researchers told their readers that the experience curve was real and would probably persist in cutting PV prices indefinitely. But they went on to reduce expected industry growth rates to only 15–20

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into almost everything that is manufactured because they are so cheap. The volume of transistors that are shipped each year continues to rise, further driving experience curve benefits and cutting costs yet more. One analyst recently estimated that the number made is rising by about 65 per cent a year, meaning that

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if they do not spend they will be left behind by the cost improvements captured by their competitors. I cannot see any reason why the experience curve in solar PV will stop. The world will use lighter and cheaper materials for the panels – in fact they probably won’t be panels in

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of how the technology of solar photovoltaics will improve. Doyne Farmer, a mathematics professor at Oxford University, has made a study of the reliability of experience curve trends. If we know a particular technology has fallen in cost by 20 per cent for every doubling of accumulated production, how certain can we

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be that the trend will continue? Doyne and his colleague François Lafond did their work based on dozens of experience curves for different products and showed the underlying reliability of the continued decline in cost. If a product is on an

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experience curve of a particular rate, it tends to stay at that percentage. They showed, based on statistical analysis of the history of other commodities, that there

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decline Almost every single forecast over the last sixty years for the progress of solar power has been too pessimistic. Although the slope of the experience curve for PV has been well understood for at least a decade, no one seems to have predicted the continued rapid growth in installations around the

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aggregate effect of many different small improvements will continue the decline in overall PV system cost. One recent study suggested that the slope of the experience curve for inverters may be as high as 18.9 per cent, a figure very similar to solar panels themselves. Improving module efficiency, as Oxford PV

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is a better long-term solution, even in most of the world’s windy locations? The reason is that photovoltaics are on a much steeper experience curve, and even if they are not cheaper now in some locations, they will almost certainly become so within a few years. The International Energy Agency

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built. Wind turbine farms will continue to be able to provide electricity at lower and lower prices but because of the shallower slope of the experience curve and because PV is growing much more rapidly and so gaining improved costs, solar will eventually be much cheaper. In only a few benighted places

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manufacturers for much of the recent progress in lithium ion electricity storage. These companies and their suppliers are betting on the brute force of the experience curve. Build bigger and bigger factories and move into new markets, such as domestic electricity storage, and the increases in the number of batteries produced will

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of battery in both appliances. However, the car battery has about 4,000 times as much electricity storage. Electric transportation has pushed batteries down the experience curve further and faster than laptops and mobile phones could have achieved on their own. The single most important figure in the battery industry today is

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of lithium ion batteries in static storage as well. Elon Musk unveils Tesla’s ‘Powerwall’ battery storage at an event in California, April 2015. The experience curve, again As with solar PV, virtually no one predicted the declines in battery cost that we are now seeing. In 2009 Deutsche Bank reported the

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on the rate of decline of lithium ion battery costs. His estimate of how much costs fell every time accumulated production doubled? He suggested an experience curve slope of 21.6 per cent, a rate of decline even faster than solar PV. Most other estimates are slightly more conservative; Michael Liebreich does

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tend to be a bit enthusiastic. But even if the experience curve is slightly less steep than he suggests, the rate of growth of battery volumes more than makes up for this. (Remember that the speed of

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cost of a battery or a solar panel is determined both by the steepness of its experience curve and the rate of growth of accumulated production.) You may recollect that BCG commercialized the idea of the experience curve fifty years ago as part of the toolkit for its consulting practice. But the business that

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, whose livelihood depends partly on forecasting the cumulative impact of production volumes, didn’t really believe in the full, unavoidable, almost magical impact of the experience curve. Quicker, simpler, cheaper: 24M Batteries are evolving in a remarkably similar way to PV. There may be no further technical breakthroughs with lithium ion but

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even opening his mouth. His hand moves across his body from left to right, sinking as it goes. He’s mimicking the shape of the experience curve. ‘It doesn’t really matter if it is not inexpensive enough today. We know it will be soon. In any event, it gives people internet

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investors and customers. They all have a tough road in front of them as rechargeable batteries of the lithium ion variety are sliding down an experience curve that makes them cheaper every month. Chapter 7 Storing energy as gas or liquids Even with millions of batteries located in homes and at electricity

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his view, we can expect huge reductions in cost as the industry grows in scale over the next few years and electrolysis undergoes a sharp experience curve. An engineer from Siemens said the same: they expect the manufacturing of the crucial membranes for electrolysis to move within a couple of years from

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167–72 lighting 165–6 Engie 7 Enterococcus 215 Entrade 145–6 Eos 203–4 EPR 15 ethanol 223, 243–5 Euphorbia Tirucalli 135, 137 experience curve 18–19, 33 batteries 175, 176–9, 187, 210 inverters 97 photovoltaics 22, 26, 30–1, 33 transistors 31–2 wind power 123 Exxon 3

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corporate investment 65–7 cost declines 1, 2–4, 21–33, 42, 45, 46–51, 123–4, 254 daily curve 90–6, 147, 260–1 experience curve 22, 26, 30–33 films 84–90 financing 4, 98–114 Germany 217, 218–20 grid integration costs 56 India 53–8 Kenya 62–4