Part #4 - How bundling “good enough” systems at scale changes everything 

I spent a decade in the manufacturing industry, specifically in the color printer and copier industry, working for Tektronix and Xerox, and I participated in the “mainstreaming” of a variety of market-changing products that were once niche and too expensive for most.

For decades, the best way to outfit an office was with standalone machines:

• A high-quality laser printer

• A dedicated flatbed scanner

• A copy machine

• Maybe a fax machine, if you were fancy

Each one performed its job well, and specialists in each space made sure that these units were mostly sold and deployed in a siloed fashion, which contributed to the suppression of various innovations.

Working inside R&D, we were aware of various innovations, but management resisted change.

Then came the MFP, the Multi-Function Printer, and at first, it was a joke; the scanners were weak, the printers were low-quality, and the interfaces were clunky.

Everyone knew that the MFP couldn’t match the quality of separate machines, and at first they were right, and still: it changed the industry, because the MFP didn’t win on technical perfection.

The MFP won on coherence.

allegory: MFP as a market disruptor is similar to the TerraCores package of bundled services

The MFP won on convenience, on lower total cost of ownership.

It won on desk space, and ultimately: the MFP won on superior economies of scale.

Over time, MFPs got good enough to beat the standalone units they replaced. Then they got better…then they became the standard.

As a creative packaging of three to four originally inferior products (printer, scanner, hard disk, sometimes fax), the MFP is a simple example of a disruptive innovation.

Disruptive Innovations

The large variety of innovations in the building material domain enables Terra Global Development to operate in every region on Earth, deploying the proper building material and bundled technological innovation for each respective climate.

Disruptive and distributive innovations often begin inside the very institutions they threaten to replace, conceived by insiders who see what’s broken, but large organizations are built to protect their current models, not replace them.

So these ideas are quietly shelved, deprioritized, or killed. For the innovation to survive, it usually has to be carried outside the institution, where it can take root without being smothered by legacy incentives.

TerraCores follow this exact arc: born from deep experience inside traditional systems, but grown outside them, so they can thrive.

In his landmark work The Innovator’s Dilemma, author and business researcher Clayton Christensen showed how transformative technologies often begin as “inferior” alternatives - cheaper, simpler, and easier to use - but eventually reshape entire industries by serving those the incumbents overlooked.

TerraCores embody the type of disruptive innovation Clayton Christensen described in The Innovator’s Dilemma

Again, one thing that makes TerraCores (and Terra Global Developments) unique is that the care, feeding, and sometimes the manufacturing of the technologies themselves is sited within the TerraCores communities, which builds vocational education and stewardship into the model.

TerraCores are cheaper, simpler, and easier to use than the dominant models of housing, infrastructure, and community planning, and while traditional systems compete on performance at the high end - luxury housing, centralized utilities, complex governance - TerraCores meet people where they are.

TerraCores don’t try to be best-in-class; they’re good enough to matter right now, especially for those underserved or priced out of conventional systems.

And just like the disruptive products that Christensen studied - Toyota in the auto market, Canon in copiers, or early personal computers - TerraCores start at the edges. But over time, they evolve, improve, and move upmarket, eventually overtaking legacy systems that can’t adapt.

The TerraCores Strategy Is the Same Playbook

The current model is antiquated: we have long ago experienced diminishing returns trying to turn every community into a dependent class of pure consumers within an extractive system that takes more than it gives. TerraCores don’t replace the current model; it enhances it, keeping fiscal velocity healthy as “last mile” communities take root and begin to thrive.

We’re doing with infrastructure what the MFP did with office hardware: Bundling decentralized systems into a unified, modular unit that improves faster (and gets adopted faster) than centralized systems can adapt.

TerraCores are a Minimal Viable Community (formerly MVCU). It’s a packaged residential pod that combines:

• Affordable housing (e.g. prefab, rammed earth, microstructures)

• Energy resilience (solar, battery, microgrid-ready)

• Water systems (capture, reuse, or off-grid treatment)

• Food production (Farming Ecology Centers, Sprout Pods, fully-automated farming, micro-farming, aquaponics)

• Decentralized education (via homeschooling, cooperative education, vocational training, on-site R&D “living laboratories)

• Cooperative economics (via Bene Esse: childcare, home repair, shared kitchens)

• Digital governance (via 214 Alpha: ID, voting, banking, arbitration, communications)

Not every module is best-in-class, but the system is “good enough” to start, and structurally designed to get better over time.

Just like MFPs, which began with sub-standard modules that evolved over time to become market leaders in their own right.

Up Next: Part 5 - Strength in Numbers