The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Management of Innovation and Change)

Processes and values define how resources—many of which can be bought and sold, hired and fired—are combined to create value.

best at this, that is, they have well-developed systems for killing ideas that their customers don’t want.

The properties of its products varied according to the metallurgical composition and impurities of the scrap. Hence, about the only market that minimill producers could address was that for steel reinforcing bars (rebars)—right at the bottom of the market in terms of quality, cost, and margins.

The early 5.25-inch drive makers found this application (one might even say that they enabled it) by trial and error, selling drives to whomever would buy them.

These successful practitioners have in common their apparent understanding—whether explicit or intuitive—of both their customers’ trajectories of need and their own technologists’ trajectories of supply. Understanding these trajectories is the key to their success thus far. But the list of firms that have consistently done this is disturbingly shor

parallel value networks, each built around a different definition of what makes a product valuable, may exist within the same broadly defined industry.

They generally occur after the company has made full investments in product design, manufacturing, engineering, marketing, and distribution. Hence, middle managers—acting in both their own and the company’s interest—tend to back those projects for which market demand seems most assured.

Whether a firm was a start-up or a diversified firm had little impact on its success rate. What mattered appears not to have been its organizational form, but whether it was a leader in introducing disruptive products and creating the markets in which they were sold.

financial analysts have a better intuition for the value of resources than for processes.