Only the paranoid and fast will survive

SLR cameras, pagers, paper maps, travel agents, home telephones, answering machines, transistor radios;  all quaint reminders of days gone by. Today whole new industries are taking over from the old.  The way we find places to stay when we travel, transportation, even the nature of money itself, is changing.

Back in the 90’s we heard about the “Innovators Dilemma.”  About how cheap products would flood the market, before other manufactures could create products with higher value. Perhaps Sony and other Japanese companies were the penultimate example.

Today, new products enter the marketplace full blown. They are cheaper and more efficient and receive instant acceptance.  How do traditional incumbents defend against this?  They don’t. They either innovate on today’s terms, or they go the way of Blockbuster, or Blackberry or Kodak, or Garmin.

These are just some of the ideas put forth by Larry Downes in his new book, Big Bang Disruption: Strategy in the Age of Devastating Innovation.

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My conversation with Larry Downes: