Business 2.0 The 15-Minute Competitive Advantage

"The path to success involves staying a little ahead of the competition but close enough that customers can still understand your product and incorporate it into their lives and businesses. I recently conducted a survey of 785 tech company executives to find out why some succeeded and others did not. I found that newer companies (started after 1980) were much more likely than larger, established companies to cite marketplace barriers -- with customers that were not receptive or ready -- as a primary obstacle. Human behavior is much slower to change than technology.

Years of research shows that the innovations most likely to take hold are those that don't demand excessive change from the customer. Incrementalism -- represented by the following eight characteristics -- is key."

redux [01.08.01]
MIT Technology Review In the Weeds

"The problem isn’t figuring out how to get people to become more “innovative”; it’s figuring out how to get people to accept and apply innovations more productively. The glut of new ideas has paradoxically created a critical shortage of the human ingredients that determine just how quickly and cost effectively they get used.

So instead of celebrating the “heroic brilliance” of innovators, this column will explore innovation from a different and more important perspective. After all, it is customers and clients—not innovators—who determine how great ideas become successful innovations."

redux [10.25.01]
MarketingProfs.Com Will and Vision: How Latecomers Grow to Dominate Markets

"Everybody thinks that it's the market pioneers who have the best name recognition, the highest market share, and the most enduring market leadership....Right?"

"Our discoveries may surprise the business community. After exposing the limitations of prior studies that extolled the success of pioneers, we find that pioneers mostly fail, have low market share, and are rarely enduring market leaders. In addition, we found that the current trend of staking everything on getting there first all-too-often leads companies to embrace a disastrous strategy of rushing to market with incomplete, inferior, and flawed products."

redux [05.03.01]
Fast Company Hard Cell

"In many ways, the Smartphone's evolution is a classic story of high-tech innovation within a big company. It starts with a small team of engineers at Qualcomm Inc. in San Diego, who were given a hazy but intriguing mandate. Gradually, they came to believe that they could produce a breakthrough product -- even if outsiders were dubious. Repeated crises erupted along the way, including a near-death experience in February 2000 when their division was sold to the San Diego subsidiary of Japan's Kyocera International Inc. For a while, it appeared that no one wanted the Smartphone project to continue. Yet the engineers pressed on in skunk-works fashion, improvising solutions as needed, until they emerged with a product that attracted enthusiastic mobs at trade shows, media events -- and even the passenger lounge at Chicago's O'Hare airport."

strategy+business Top 10 Innovation Themes

"Does history repeat itself when companies seek ways to innovate? Are there patterns among the business strategies chosen by successful companies from one decade to the next?

To find out, we studied nearly 200 business strategies, most from the past 20 years, but some from a century ago. From this research we identified 10 essential “innovation themes,” which are repeated and proven over time."

redux [03.06.01]
First Monday Intermittent Aberrations: Can Mature Companies Innovate?

"A whole literature has grown up around the apparently intractable hostility between innovation and bureaucracy, between those who create and those who control. Smart and speedy start-ups blindside mature companies with their inventiveness then grow up into mature companies and are outsmarted in their turn. The only way for innovation to survive in mature companies is to isolate the creators from the managers in protected enclaves. If this is true, it means that it is virtually impossible for sustained innovation to be built into the everyday operation of mature companies; it can only ever be an intermittent aberration."

redux [11.07.00]
BusinessWeek The Innovator's Dilemma

"This chapter summarizes the history of the disk drive industry in all its complexity. Some readers will be interested in it for the sake of history itself. But the value of understanding this history is that out of its complexity emerge a few stunningly simple and consistent factors that have repeatedly determined the success and failure of the industry's best firms. Simply put, when the best firms succeeded, they did so because they listened responsively to their customers and invested aggressively in the technology, products, and manufacturing capabilities that satisfied their customers' next-generation needs. But, paradoxically, when the best firms subsequently failed, it was for the same reasons--they listened responsively to their customers and invested aggressively in the technology, products, and manufacturing capabilities that satisfied their customers' next-generation needs. This is one of the innovator's dilemmas: Blindly following the maxim that good managers should keep close to their customers can sometimes be a fatal mistake.

The history of the disk drive industry provides a framework for understanding when "keeping close to your customers" is good advice--and when it is not."