Why innovators don't always win
Experience shows that good ideas and
early success aren’t enough. What does it take to stay on top?
The idea for the world’s first CT
scanner was conceived in 1967 by Godfrey Hounsfield, a scientist at EMI, a
British company. However, much to EMI’s dismay, by the time Hounsfield was
rewarded for his innovation with the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physiology or
Medicine, the company had ceded almost complete control over the CT scanner
market to later entrants GE and Siemens.
H. Edward Roberts, designer of the
Altair computer circa 1975, is widely regarded as the inventor of the personal
computer. The legendary Steve Jobs and his partner Steve Wozniak were the duo
who brought the PC to the masses in 1977. However, by the early 1980s, it was a
later entrant IBM, rather than Altair or Apple, which dominated the global PC
industry. Using Intel and Microsoft as key suppliers (of the microprocessor and
the operating system respectively), IBM entered the PC business in 1981 – fully
four years after Apple’s entry.
Marc Andreessen, leader of the
Mosaic team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and
co-founder of Netscape, launched the world’s first commercial internet browser
circa 1993-1994 and quickly commanded a market share of over 90 percent. Yet,
barely five years later, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer had come to dominate the
browser market rendering Netscape Navigator to the verge of extinction.
Harsh
reality
These and countless other examples
illustrate a harsh reality. More often than not, the innovating firm is not the
one that survives or emerges as the market leader even five years down the
road. In his first stint at Apple, Steve Jobs was blind to this common reality.
In his second stint, however, Jobs was far shrewder. During his twelve-year
exile from Apple, he had learned how to translate insanely great innovations
into sustainable market leadership.
Why do innovators not always win
(and why is it that that sometimes they do)? We outline four primary reasons,
going from the most to the least obvious.
The first and most common reason why
innovators lose out to shrewd followers is an inability to protect one’s
intellectual property rights. Schneider Electric, the French company, learned a
harsh lesson when it found itself the target of an IP-infringement lawsuit by
Chint, a Chinese company. Schneider’s argument that Chint was a copycat which
had pre-empted it in China by obtaining a local patent proved futile in Chinese
courts. Schneider was forced to pay damages and cede the market for the
particular product to its nemesis.
A second reason why innovators often
cede the ground to followers is overlooking the fact that innovation is a
never-ending race. You may be the pioneer in round one. However, if you get
overly focused on exploitation and not enough on ongoing exploration, a
competitor could learn from and leapfrog over you in round two. The videogame
console industry has demonstrated this phenomenon repeatedly. Nolan Bushnell,
widely regarded as the “father of videogames” founded Atari Corporation in 1972
and hired Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak as two of his earliest employees. By
1982, Atari had reached nearly US$2 billion in revenues, making it the fastest
growing company in U.S. history. However, as new technologies would continue to
emerge, leadership in the home videogame industry switched repeatedly - from
Atari to Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), then to Sega (Genesis), from
there to Sony (PlayStation), and then from Sony to Microsoft (Xbox).
Excessive
devotion
A third important factor why
innovators don’t always win has to do with excessive devotion to technological
wizardry and not enough to usability and customer benefits. This is largely why
Apple’s first PDA, the Newton, proved to be a commercial dud. Instead of
resting on their laurels too early, innovators need to spend the time and
effort to look at the product from the customer’s point of view. What customers
care about is ease-of-use and derived benefits, not technological innovation
per se.
The fourth, least obvious and often
the most potent reason why innovators don’t always win, has to do with
blindness to the importance of complements. EMI’s technological leadership in
CT scanners was, by itself, not sufficient to win with hospitals. It also
needed a manufacturing, sales, and service network – domains where GE and
Siemens had a commanding advantage over EMI. A cool PC, such as the 1984 Mac,
could not by itself win market leadership with families and office workers.
Computers are useless without application software, a domain where the
IBM-Microsoft-Intel team was far ahead of Apple. Far too many innovators
overlook the critical role that complements play in enabling the company to win
the hearts, minds, and wallets of end customers.
Even smart political leaders can
fall prey to the dangers of ignoring the criticality of complements. Barack
Obama and Joe Biden have repeatedly called on America to out-innovate emerging
economies such as China and India. Obama and Biden overlook, however, that
America’s problems have little to do with any real or perceived weakness in
R&D. Instead, the country’s problems are rooted far more squarely in a
complement to R&D – a manufacturing sector that is much weaker than it was
in 1990.
By Anil K. Gupta and Haiyan
Wang |
http://knowledge.insead.edu/innovation/why-innovators-dont-always-win-611
No comments:
Post a Comment