Competition in the Digital Age
Sometimes a post appears that just annoys you so much that you need to comment on it. That happened to me yesterday with this post from Arjun Sethi on at all places, BackChannel (a blog I ordinarily like). Sethi is a product manager at Yahoo but was actually motivated by this passage from Facebook's Little …
Continue reading "Killing yourself to survive is not the same as innovating"
We currently are in the Wild West of "sharing." Many people hate that term but I actually think it is useful. I would define the "Sharing Economy" as follows: 1. Individuals own key assets -- cars, dwellings, their time etc. 2. There exists a market platform to match those individuals with consumers that satisfies the …
Continue reading "Uber, sharing and the compensation mechanism"
Apparently not, according to Tom Bartman, an associate with Clay Christensen’s research group at Harvard Business School. In a report from Harvard Business Review, they apply a framework to understand whether a new firm, like Tesla, will disrupt an old one, like GM or Toyota. The framework asks 5 questions: Does the product target over-served …
Nokia, Motorola, Sony-Ericsson and BlackBerry were all victims of disruption. During the 1990s and 2000s, they led the cell phone during its period of take-off into ubiquity. Then in the last five years, they have lost their leadership and are on the verge of irrelevance. The common culprit was the 2007 launch of Apple’s iPhone. …
Continue reading "Why the iPhone confounds disruption theorists"
This week a couple of outlets provided coverage of my forthcoming Management Science paper with Matt Marx and David Hsu. Techcrunch: Taking a Wait and See Approach with Disruptive Innovations Knowledge@Wharton: Why Disruptive Innovation can Help Market Leaders Put simply, the overwhelming response from the Christensen-led school of disruptive theory is that incumbents are doomed …
Continue reading "'Wait and See' as the appropriate response to disruption"
Over the past two weeks, I have been outlining broad strategic options for entrepreneurs of which a disruption strategy is just one choice. The concept is that a given entrepreneurial idea can be commercialised in many different ways. The key to entrepreneurial strategy is to identify the feasible set of choices available to start-ups and …
Continue reading "Another choice: The Intellectual Property Strategy"
This post is a continuing part of an on-going series on entrepreneurial strategy. The previous posts in the series involved disruptive strategy and are here and here. Recall that the notion of entrepreneurial strategy is based on the foundation that once you have an idea the business model that is matched to commercialise that idea …
Continue reading "Choosing not to disrupt (Embedding in a value chain)"
Yesterday, I argued that start-ups have a choice as to what strategy or business model they select to pair with their idea. In so doing, I looked at their choice to pursue a disruptive strategy which I defined as (a) competing against established firms in the market (as oppose to cooperating or licensing to them) and (b) …
The recent debate over 'disruption theory' has focussed on the over-use of the word 'disruption' and also on whether it can be used to predict the fate of incumbents in various industries. Somewhat lost in that discussion is precisely what disruption means for start-ups. There has been a tendency to think that start-ups should have …
It is not everyday that there is a long New Yorker article sitting squarely in my field -- innovation strategy. But this week we have one by Jill Lepore who conducts a systematic 'take down' of Clay Christensen. For those of you who have read Christensen's work and found his cases convincing, Lepore pulls them …
Continue reading "The easy target that is the Theory of Disruptive Innovation"
Digitopoly 