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

Each of these factors argues for a policy of implanting projects to commercialize disruptive innovations in small organizations that will view the projects as being on their critical path to growth and success, rather than as being distractions from the main business of the company.

They did not fail because management was sleepy or arrogant. They failed because hydraulics didn’t make sense—until it was too late.

Hence, just as a value network is characterized by a specific rank-ordering of product attributes valued by customers, it is also characterized by a specific cost structure required to provide the valued products and services.

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 first followed creation of a new application for rigid disk drives: desktop computing, in which product attributes such as physical size, relatively unimportant in established applications, were highly valued.

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.

The metrics featured most prominently in early product literature of hydraulic backhoes were shovel width (contractors wanted to dig narrow, shallow trenches) and the speed and maneuverability of the tractor.

a vast, middle-of-the-road array of mid-priced goods and services—is no longer competitive. No question, the constant disappointments, the repeated predictions of a turnaround that never seems to come, have reduced the credibility of Sears’ management in both the financial and merchandising communities.