What determines commercial success for a product has been the Holy Grail that businesses and the academic world have been studying for four decades. The Product Development and Management Association has done numerous benchmark studies to find the critical drivers of success.
The innovation blind spot is everybody’s problem: whether you are a CEO or a project team member; in a large multinational or an emergent start-up; in the corporate sector or at a nonprofit; contributing to a collaborative effort or investing in one. [p. 1]
represents a fundamentally new way of thinking about product strategy. Strategy must precede execution.
The Wide Lens is divided into three parts:
Part 1 Seeing the Ecosystem (Chapters 1-3);
Part II Choosing Your Position (Chapters 4-6); and
Part III Winning the Game (Chapters 7-9).
Chapter 1 examines why things can go wrong even though an organization has done everything right. The lack of taking a broad look outside the organization at the entire ecosystem can create blind spots. New innovations challenge the status quo and must be understood. For instance, Michelin’s run-flat tires (self-supporting tires), while being a technological success and embraced by automobile manufacturers, did not have buy-in from service centers which had to acquire new machines to fix run-flat tires and subsequently failed to gain adoption by consumers (p. 240).
Chapter 2 discusses co-innovation risk, when you are dependent on other innovations for a successful launch of your innovation. Nokia, the market leader in 2G handsets, failed to make a successful transition to 3G because they did not realize there were new co-innovators. Success was more than just making a great handset. You needed solutions and infrastructure to handle digital imaging, databases and digital rights management.
Adoption chain risk is the focus of Chapter 3. Lapses in understanding the barriers to adoption by all customers (the term customer includes co-innovators, distributors, retailers and end customers) in the value blueprint result in product failure because one of the customers was not properly incentivized to support the new product. The author suggests methods for managing adoption risk based on understanding the total cost versus relative benefit (not absolute benefit) and assembling each customer’s risk into an adoption chain. Innovations can be compared based on how strong the adoption chain is for each. More importantly, an innovation’s total cost versus relative benefit risk must be positive for each customer. A minus represents reluctance by a customer to embrace the new innovation. If there are minuses, then the leader of the new innovation must find an innovative way to reconfigure the ecosystem itself so that every customer has a plus in the adoption chain [p. 65]. The author uses the adoption chain to analyze the success of Digital Cinema supporters to successfully transition the movie industry ecosystem from analog to digital movie formats (pp. 66-78).
Chapter 4 provides instructions on how to map a complete ecosystem and avoid having blind spots in your ecosystem, which can be disastrous. Omissions by Sony in e-book and Pfizer in inhalable insulin proved to be costly initiatives. These innovations are contrasted to Amazon’s success in e-books with Kindle [pp. 95-100].
In Chapter 5 “Establishing the Appropriate Leader” (which may or may not be the innovator), the author attributes much of Amazon’s success with the Amazon Kindle to having the right resources and infrastructure to be the leader versus a hardware manufacturer like Sony. An interesting analysis of Electronic Health Records is given (an innovation that is still in progress) that has experienced fragmented adoption, but because of US government intervention via incentives to individual doctors (p. 131) may now be on the road to success.
Chapter 6 “The Right Place and Time” discusses why timing is important for innovation success. The success in the MP3 player market of the Apple iPod, which was three years late, is attributed to Steve Jobs’ forethought and discipline not to jump into the market until improvements in broadband (for fast downloads) and disk drive technology (miniaturization and music storage capacity) were excellent. More brilliant was his understanding of the ecosystem and the creation of iTunes to enable legitimate downloads of MP3 music that made it possible for the music industry to also win (p. 146).
Chapter 7 “Changing the Game” looks at ways to change the ecosystem to your advantage as well as of all your customers. The author analyzes the problems with electric vehicles in depth by assessing the current ecosystem. The five levers of ecosystem reconfiguration are identified, namely, separation, combination, relocation, addition and subtraction, to show how they could be used to address the various challenges. The real world efforts of Better Place launched by Shai Agassi examines how their current efforts are utilizing the five levers for early innovation success (pp. 180-192).
Chapter 8 “Sequencing for Success” discusses the minimum viable footprint (MVF) as a way to keep from creating an innovation solution that is too complex to launch (p. 194). From the MVF, the innovation can be expanded by deploying the next iteration of the innovation in stages (staged expansion). Finally, consideration is given on how to leverage the success in one ecosystem into another. Apple’s success with the iPod was used to launch the iPhone and iPad. End users wanted to have their iTunes music in their iPhone, plus they had come to appreciate how easy it was to buy software from the Apple Store (pp. 210-221).
Chapter 9 “Multiplying Your Odds of Success” is a short chapter that really looks at how to use the wide lens approach to evaluate your entire portfolio. Recognition of problems with your value blueprint allows you to take action whether that is killing an innovation or attempting to reconfigure for success. It can serve as a filter to assess strategic risk prior to the execution phases. As mentioned in the beginning of this review, strategy must precede execution.
Intel has always been good at managing the ecosystems in the personal computer and server market where they were the 800-pound gorilla. These markets exist in large part because of Intel’s success at creating technology standards that were widely embraced by original equipment manufacturer customers. However, my work with other divisions that Intel acquired in the late 1990s was not so successful. They had difficulty building ecosystems in unfamiliar markets. In retrospect, I believe application of wide lens strategic thinking would have significantly improved the chances of commercial success.
Today, as a small business consultant, I come across many entrepreneurs and new business owners who lack understanding of the needed ecosystem for success. Their internal focus and lofty aspirations blind them to looking externally and objectively. They would be wise in adopting wide lens strategies into their business thinking. Combining these strategies with other concepts such as Business Model Generation [1] can be the building blocks for success.
My hope is that this book offers you a broad perspective to help you navigate the new and changing world of interdependence. (p. 2,310).
to those interested in innovation success. The author presents an advanced but pragmatic strategy for new innovations. Co-innovator and adoption risk can be high, and having blind spots can be fatal. For those with established products, this book offers valuable insights on how to improve future success. This book may be the most valuable for those experiencing slow or no adoption because the best time to kill an innovation is when you realize there is no strategy for success. As stated before, strategy before execution.
