"Nothing new under the sun? History repeats itself? Not according to two eminent historians, who see unprecedented changes in how inventions come about.

The historians - Arthur Molella, director of the Smithsonian Institution's Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, and James Burke, producer of the PBS television series Connections and author of such books on invention as The Pinball Effect: How Renaissance Water Gardens Made the Carburetor Possible and Other Journeys Through Knowledge - say cheap information technology has created the biggest revolution in creating, distributing, and comparing information since Gutenberg invented the printing press. As a result, they see the capacity for innovation moving beyond an elite, hyper-educated group and diffusing into the hands of the masses worldwide. Everyone now can get in on the act."

redux [08.31.01]
Fortune Inside the Revolution: Smart Mover, Dumb Mover

"In reality, of course, first-mover advantages proved illusory. For most dot-com startups, being first was simply a way to lose more, faster. Many pundits began to argue that being a fast follower was a better strategy than trying to be the leader. Old-economy CEOs, eager to avoid the hard work of strategic innovation, seized upon this diagnosis to justify their instinctive fear of novelty. Suddenly, timidity was heralded as a virtue.

But the fast-follower advocates had it wrong as well. Most Internet companies failed not because they were first movers but because they were dumb movers. What companies should learn from the Internet debacle is not that being first is a dangerous form of hubris but that being dumb seldom succeeds. When it comes to trailblazing, there are at least three ways to be a dumb mover--none of which is unique to Internet startups."

redux [06.01.01]
MIT Technology Review The Myth of "Internet Time"

"However, being first-or even one of the first-doesn't necessarily confer an overwhelming advantage. Just consider the early personal computer pioneers, such as Atari. Where are they now? Even the recent history of the Internet abounds in counterexamples to the thesis of first-mover advantage. Look at the market for Internet search engines. Five years ago, AltaVista achieved a technical breakthrough that propelled it to dominant status on the world's desktops. Today, AltaVista is a distant also-ran."

" The main reason the first-mover advantage is much less potent than is commonly claimed is that Internet time, the dominant theme of the dot-com bubble, is false. Yes, product development cycles have become noticeably shorter. This is true not just in software, but also in such old-economy products as cars. But consumers do not operate on Internet time. Novel technologies do not diffuse notably more rapidly than they did in the days before dot coms strode the earth."

redux [02.17.01]
Internet World Nielsen on Usability: First-Mover Advantage Is Overrated

"Most of the successful Internet companies were not anywhere near the first to market. There probably is some first-mover advantage, but it has been much overrated and used as a poor excuse for foisting poor-quality services on the public."

"I do not advocate delaying release until you have the perfect design, but I do think that history shows that it is not necessary to rush low-quality products to market as the only way to win. Higher quality that takes a little longer can often be a better strategy."

redux [11.07.00]
Fortune Getting Beyond the Innovation Fetish

"Jennifer Brown, the executive vice president of e-business at Fidelity Investments, has a serious problem with innovation in her group. There's too much of it.

"We have more good ideas than we can handle," she confesses. "We have so many good ideas here--truly innovative ideas--that sometimes our people get a little frustrated that we can't act on most of them.""

"At times like this, a cold economic reality kicks in: The more innovations there are, the less valuable any given innovation is likely to be.

"Another thing that makes cashing in on innovation so difficult is that, as any good intellectual property lawyer will complain, the very digital technologies that make it faster, easier, and cheaper for innovators to innovate also make it faster, easier, and cheaper for imitators to imitate. In the e-world, today's innovation is tomorrow's imitation is next month's commodity. The Net is a fabulous medium for "fast followers"--firms such as Microsoft and AOL, which do a fabulous job of spotting an innovation trend and leveraging resources to make it their own."

Inc.Com Best Beats First

"In fact, being first seldom proves to be a sustainable advantage and usually proves to be a liability. VisiCalc, for example, was the first major personal-computer spreadsheet. Where is VisiCalc today? Do you know anyone who uses it? And what of the company that pioneered it? Gone; it doesn't even exist. VisiCalc eventually lost out to Lotus 1-2-3, which itself lost out to Excel. Lotus then went into a tailspin and was saved only by selling out to IBM."

"The pattern of the second (or third or fourth) market entrant's prevailing over the early trailblazers shows up throughout the entire history of technological and economic change.

"We can already see the fundamental laws of management and commerce reasserting themselves. Consider America Online, clearly a new-economy star that got there by being better, not first. As Kara Swisher describes in her book aol.com, AOL lagged far behind CompuServe and Prodigy, and as late as 1992 had only 200,000 members compared with Prodigy's nearly 2 million. AOL beat out the early leaders not because it had the ultimate solution, but precisely because it knew that it didn't. So long as AOL continues the process of nonstop improvement and evolution -- step-by-step improvement in the eyes of the customer -- it will likely remain strong."