There Are More Than 9,000

In My First Career I Had Founded My Own Company, With A Group Of Mit Professors, Before Coming To Harvard To Finish My Doctorate, And So I Had A Deep Respect For The Brains, Talent, And Dedication Of Managers. That Made It Hard For Me To Believe The Attributions In The Business Press That Stupid Management Was To Blame. So I Looked Elsewhere For An Explanation.

In General, The Questions That Are On Our Mind Are The Same Questions That Have Been Driving Our Work Over The Past Decade. How Do We Bring Order To This Messy, Unpredictable World Of Innovation? How Can We Dramatically Improve The Chances Of Creating A Successful New-growth Business? How Can We Do This Again And Again? More Specifically, It Has Become Very Clear That The Fundamental Paradigms Of Market Segmentation And Branding Are Badly Broken - And We're Working On Developing More Useful Theories For These Dimensions Of Innovation.

Often They [writers On The Study Of Management] Have A Point Of View Based Upon Intuition And Experience. They Then Offer A Cadence Of Two-paragraph Examples Carefully Selected To "prove" Their Theory, And Then They Write "one Size Fits All" Books. The Message Is, "if You'd Do What These Companies Did, You'd Be Successful Too."

Innovation Almost Always Is Not Successful The First Time Out. You Try Something And It Doesn't Work And It Takes Confidence To Say We Haven't Failed Yet. Ultimately You Become Commercially Successful.

Regulatory Fiat Cannot Create A Market At A Technologically Interdependent Interface. And By The Same Token, Regulation And So-called Monopoly Power Rarely Prevail At Modular Interfaces Between Stages Of Value-added Technology.