Network Mapping. Adner, Associate Professor of Business Administration | Popular Press. The Wide Lens | Excerpt. This book is about the difference between great innovations that succeed and great innovations that fail. It is about the blind spots that undermine great managers in great companies even if they identify real customer needs, deliver great products, and beat their competition to market. It is about why, with ever greater frequency, your success depends not just on your ability to execute your own promises but also on whether a host of partners—some visible, some hidden—deliver on their promises too.
The innovation blind spot is everybody's problem: whether you are a CEO or project team member; in a large multinational or an emergent start-up; in the corporate sector or at a nonprofit; contributing to a collaborative effort or investing in one. No matter your situation, your success depends not just on your own efforts but also on the ability, willingness, and likelihood that the partners that make up your innovation ecosystem succeed as well. Yes. Innovation, Expectations, and Reality. Match Your Innovation Strategy to Your Innovation Ecosystem. The Idea in Brief Most breakthrough innovations don’t succeed in isolation.
They need complementary innovations to attract customers. Consider high-definition TVs. Top-quality HDTV sets were ready for mass market in the early 1990s. But critical supporting elements—signal compression technologies, broadcasting standards—weren’t. Clearly, operating in an innovation ecosystem—the synthesis of your new offerings and other firms’ that creates a coherent customer solution—carries risk. Correctly assess ecosystem risks, and you establish more realistic expectations and accurate contingency plans for every new offering. The Idea in Practice Author Ron Adner proposes assessing innovation ecosystem risks by answering these questions: How Does Our Project Measure Up? Evaluate your own offering’s feasibility—considering likely attractiveness to customers, competition, supply chain capabilities, and project team quality. Whose Projects Must Succeed Before Ours Can? Example: Where Should We Compete? A Sad Lesson in Collaborative Innovation - Ron Adner.
By Ron Adner | 10:49 AM May 9, 2012 The innovator’s quest has been to find the win-win proposition: a great new product that can create differentiated value for consumers while supporting differentiated profits for the producer. But the focus on win-win can blind us to the needs of critical partners. When success depends on others — suppliers, complementors, distributors, retailers — satisfying end consumers is not enough. The innovator’s job is now to create wins across the board. Win-lose-win is a recipe for failure. Nokia’s transformation from undisputed leader in mobile telephony to struggling me-too player offers a sad but instructive lesson in the new dynamics of collaborative innovation. Through the first half of the last decade, a foundation of Nokia’s competitive advantage was its unmatched ability to customize a wide variety of phones for operators. Apple learned from Nokia’s mistake.
As the Nokia vs. Crafting a proposition that appeals to each of your key partners. Why Great Innovations Fail: It's All in the Ecosystem. BlackBerry's Next Killer App - Forbes.com. Why Innovation Fails - Book Excerpt: ‘The Wide Lens’ - US Business News Blogs. Second, was the question of digital standards.
The very idea of having their copyrighted content in the digital wilderness—a hacker’s dream—sent shudders down the publishers’ spines. Sony’s proposed digital rights management (DRM) solution, the BBeB format, was just one more unproven option in a crowded field. Publisher red light number two. Turning any one of these lights green would not be enough. Sony would need a clear path to turn all of them green before publishers would come on board in a meaningful way. In the excitement of launching the PRS-500, it was clear that Sony was focused on delivering great hardware as the key to unlocking the potential of e-books.
The Kindle Conquers As the publishing industry haggled over how to make e-books a winning proposition, Amazon entered the fray in 2007. How could Amazon engineer a triumph with a weaker product? Presenting the Kindle, CEO Jeff Bezos announced, “This isn’t a device, it’s a service.” First, Amazon tackled the DRM issue. How The Kindle Stomped Sony, Or, Why Good Solutions Beat Great Products. The following is an excerpt from The Wide Lens: A New Strategy for Innovation. Launched in 2006, Sony’s Reader was a Lamborghini to the Model Ts of earlier attempts at electronic book readers. Slim and lightweight, with a highly praised “electronic ink” technology that was as easy on the eyes as was paper, it was touted as the iPod of the book industry.
It achieved what no other reader had managed: a reading experience that approximated traditional print, with all the advantages (storage, search, and portability) inherent to digital media. The launch met with much fanfare from the press, where the Reader was hailed as “the electronic gadget that could change the way we read.” Sony brought massive technology resources to the Reader project. Sony’s plan for getting e-books to readers depended on bringing on board authors, publishers, and its own e-book retailer, Connect.com.
As adopters, however, publishers were highly ambivalent about whether and how to approach e-books. Ron Adner: Kindle's Days Are Numbered -- Long Live Kindle. Amazon made headlines last week by announcing an update to its popular Kindle device. Available in late August, the Kindle 3 will be thinner, lighter, have longer battery life, more storage, and cheaper than the competition. The wifi-only version retails at $139; the 3G plus wifi version is $189. This new device marks a clear shift in the road for Amazon. When it first introduced the Kindle reader in 2007, the company kick started the nascent digital publishing space. Sony had been on the scene a year before with its own e-ink powered device, the Sony Reader, but it had failed to catch on.
Amazon's Kindle came with wireless connectivity, a seamless interface to Amazon's e-book store, and a brilliant billing solution ($9.99 for most books). So it is striking to see Amazon cede the high-end portion of the market to competitors like Apple. This approach tests the whole premise of profitability selling digital books. This outcome, however, is actually the best one possible for Amazon. The Innovator's Blindspot: Even Your Best Ideas Will Fail If Your Partners Don't Innovate Too.
The following is an excerpt from The Wide Lens: A New Strategy for Innovation. There is a blind spot that undermines great managers in great organizations even when they identify real customer needs, deliver great products, and beat their competition to market. Philips Electronics fell victim to this blind spot when it spent a fortune to pioneer high-definition television (HDTV) sets in the mid-1980s. The company’s executives drove a development effort that succeeded in creating numerous breakthroughs in television technology, offering picture quality that customers loved and that the competition, at the time, could not match. Yet, despite sterling execution and rave reviews, Philips’s high-definition TV flopped.
Even the most brilliant innovation cannot succeed when its value creation depends on other innovations--in this case the high-definition cameras and transmission standards necessary to make high-definition TV work--that fail to arrive on time. Buy The Wide Lens here. Apple's New Fraud Problem: Cracked Walls and Broken Promises | Epicenter. Apple’s announcement of a dividend and stock buyback was a welcomed boon to already well rewarded shareholders. Yet to be addressed, however, is a critical issue that affects even more vital stakeholders — its customers and developers. The rising chorus of complaints about fraud perpetrated through the App Store is a major risk for Apple’s golden status. As The New York Times reported last week: The complaints come from consumers … who say that their accounts have been hijacked or that some apps are falsely advertised.
And they come from creators of apps, who say they are having to deal with fraudulent purchases that drain their time and resources. Software makers also complain that competition in the App Store has become so brutal that many companies resort to artificially inflating their popularity rankings to grab attention. Apple’s has taken the idea of a walled garden, and extended it to the point of becoming a fortress, with a single gate for passage in and out. Ron Adner on the Chevy Volt, Nissan Leaf, electric car batteries, and A Better Place. Photo by Bill Pugliano/Getty Images In a Future Tense article today, Steve LeVine ponders the electric car’s troubles—low sales, companies shuttering—and wonders what the cause may be: Is the electric car a premature innovation?
Is it doomed to fail altogether? Or is it stuck in the “valley of death,” waiting for the supply chain to catch up? Torie Bosch is the editor of Future Tense, a project of Slate, the New America Foundation, and Arizona State that looks at the implications of new technologies. Follow her on Twitter. Follow For another perspective, I spoke with Ron Adner, an associate professor of business administration at Dartmouth and the author of the new book The Wide Lens: A New Strategy for Innovation. Future Tense: What will happen if this generation of electrical cars, like the Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid and the all-electric Nissan Leaf, fail to take off?
Future Tense: What are some of the other critical pieces that they are missing? Future Tense: Let’s talk about batteries. The Three Hidden Blind Spots That Will Crash The Electric Car. The Wide Lens | Media.
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