...it's Easier To Hold To Your Principles

At The Beginning Of Almost Every Industry, The Available Products And Services Are So Expensive To Own And Complicated To Use That Only People With A Lot Of Money And A Lot Of Skill Have Access To Them. A Disruptive Technology Is An Innovation That Simplifies The Product And Makes It So Affordable That A Whole New Population Of People Can Now Have One And Use It At The Beginning For Simple Applications, And Then It Improves To The Point That It Makes The Old Technology Obsolete.

Because These Firms Listened To Their Customers, Invested Aggressively In New Technologies That Would Provide Their Customers More And Better Products Of The Sort They Wanted, And Because They Carefully Studied Market Trends And Systematically Allocated Investment Capital To Innovations That Promised The Best Returns, They Lost Their Positions Of Leadership.

Almost Always Great New Ideas Don't Emerge From Within A Single Person Or Function, But At The Intersection Of Functions Or People That Have Never Met Before.

In General, The Questions That Are On Our Mind Are The Same Questions That Have Been Driving Our Work Over The Past Decade. How Do We Bring Order To This Messy, Unpredictable World Of Innovation? How Can We Dramatically Improve The Chances Of Creating A Successful New-growth Business? How Can We Do This Again And Again? More Specifically, It Has Become Very Clear That The Fundamental Paradigms Of Market Segmentation And Branding Are Badly Broken - And We're Working On Developing More Useful Theories For These Dimensions Of Innovation.

By The Time It Becomes Obvious That A Technology Will Have Truly Disruptive Impact, It Is Often Too Late To Take Action. This Is One Reason Why We Are Such Advocates Of Using Theory To Try To Analyze Industry Change. Conclusive Evidence That Proves That A Company Needs To Take Action Almost Never Exists. In Fact, The Data Can Fool Management, Lulling Them Into A False Sense Of Security.