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Pierce later remarked that one thing about Kelly impressed him above all else: It had to do with how his former boss would advise members of Bell Labs’ technical staff when they were asked to work on something new. Whether it was a radar technology for the military or solid-state research for the phone company, Kelly did not want to begin a project

Jon Gertner • The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

Crossing the Chasm, 3rd Edition: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers (Collins Business Essentials)

Geoffrey A. Moore

amazon.com

Cover of Crossing the Chasm, 3rd Edition: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers (Collins Business Essentials)

The famed Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter is usually associated with this term, but the basic idea goes back all the way to the works of Karl Marx. The notion (which has experienced a recent resurgence via Clayton Christensen's writings on disruptive innovation) is that in order to create something, you have to destroy something else in the pr

Frank Slootman • TAPE SUCKS: Inside Data Domain, A Silicon Valley Growth Story

The core strategy has unique elements at each level of the ecosystem: overturning the core product architecture, positioning themselves in key bottleneck components, and resolving system-level limitations that slow the adoption of the technology. At the same time, they have applied an effective approach to build their innovation capital so they can... See more

Jeff Dyer • Lessons from Tesla’s Approach to Innovation

Clayton Christensen’s influential book on business strategy describes how new players in a market start with seemingly undesirable niche segments, which are ignored by incumbents while they are focusing on the most profitable segments and use cases.

Andrew Chen • The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects

The Three Traps That Stymie Reinvention

Ryan Raffaelli sloanreview.mit.edu

Prime Computer is a classic example. It stated in 1988 that it had a “clear goal: to make money for its customers, and through that, for its owners.” That “clear” goal was too vague and too general. Some within Prime may have had a more specific vision of where they thought the company should go, but theirs was not the company’s vision. Prime was a

Michael E. McGrath • Product Strategy for High Technology Companies

Ogilvy on Advertising and Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm. In

Christopher Lochhead • Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets

Bezos: Try to find use cases for new tech that aren’t just slight improvements on the status quo, but are completely impossible with the incumbent tech.

Example: Amazon developed Fulfillment Centers that were an order of magnitude above Walmart’s Distribution Centers, as they were highly automated / incorporated robotics, while allowing for predicti