Lateral thinking using existing technologies

Precedent: How Nintendo did it I’ve consumed several Acquired episodes, and one I found particularly interesting was about Nintendo, where they describe how lateral thinking shapes how to company thinks about their products: instead of always going after the new shiny thing that still has several unknowns and will need time to iterate on, know and perfect, use instead cheaper, already established technologies / materials and come up with new ways to use them1 NES: Nintendo’s CEO provided guidance that each unit should be cheap to the consumer, but also be one year ahead of competition, which steered developers away from very expensive CPUs (competition was using just a single CPU), and instead using a cheaper slower CPU with a dedicated PPU (picture processing unit), maybe the first GPU (graphicals processing unit) on console, that leapfrogged the entire competition 5 years ahead. Game Boy: at the time, color displays were all the rage and the new attractive technology. Leadership…