For last few day’s i was experiencing with “breakthrough” a book written by Mark Stefik and Barbara Stefik published by the MIT press. It was all about stories and strategies of Radical Innovation, technology markets that have declined dramatically since the late 1990s responding to the changing business climate. Very well described about breakthrough innovations that creates something new or satisfies a previously undiscovered need, launch new industries or transform existing ones.
And our capacity for creating breakthroughs depends on a combination of science, imagination & business; the next great waves of innovation will come from organizations that get this combination right.
In breakthrough Mark and Barbara Stefik show us how innovation works. Drawing on stories from repeat inventors and managers of technology, they uncover the best practices for inventing the future. This book is for readers who want to know how inventors do their work, how people become inventors, and how businesses can create powerful cultures of innovation.
Here I will share with my readers about the S-curve matters out of many others exciting factors from these book that I feel of lacking in many technology based organization in my country.
High-technology businesses go through recognizable business cycles. After fragile and delicate beginnings, they grow rapidly and robustly. When they reach maturity they stop growing. Eventually they decline. Technology-Adoption Curves are part of the predictable landscape. They explain deep truths about how innovation ecology works. It begins with an invention. In the early part of the curve when the technology is new and immature, the market is small. It is limited to a few early adopters and small niche markets. As a technology matures and reaches the mainstream, businesses enter a phase of rapid growth. They focus with competition with other businesses, improve their products to meet evolving customers, and increase their market share. At the market peak, there is often consolidation for market share and economies of scale. When a market saturates, business look for other growth opportunities.
Sometimes companies increase their markets by expanding into new geographical areas. When it is possible, they move manufacturing or other parts of the business overseas, chasing cheaper labor. Eventually the original business is displaced by new businesses that then enter their own periods of rapid growth, destroy gradually the market of the original technology. Several factors drive S-curves. During the course of an S-curve, markets grow, companies become inflated and technical knowledge spreads. Several predictable side effects arise and shape business decisions. Competition begins, markets saturate, costs are driven down, margins evaporate and so on. Intel founder Andy Grove in his book “Only the Paranoid Survive” put it this way:
Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction. The more successful you are, the more people want a chunk of your business and then another chunk and then another until there in nothing left… A strategic inflection point is a time in the life of a business when its fundamentals are about to change. That change can mean an opportunity to rise to new heights. But it may just as likely signal the beginning of the end.
Another factor- the same one that gives rise to technologies in the first place—is that new ideas arise. Old technologies get displaced by new ones. To thrive, business needs a path to renewal. What happens is that investors start to ask where a dollar invested yields the higher return. Do you invest at the top of an S-curve, trying to hold the old S-Curve up at the top? Or do you begin investing in the bottom of the next S-curves to ride up with the new technologies?
In this long view of innovation cycles, technologies mature and leave room at the bottom. No company or country can expect to dominate a particular technology indefinitely. Technologies either move away to other regions or replaced by the next new thing. What creates a new opportunity at the bottom is:
The investment in the next round of inventions.
Mark Stefik is an inventor and research fellow at Palo Alto Research Center (PARC),
where he directs the Information Sciences and Technologies Laboratory.
Barbara Stefik has a doctorate in transpersonal psychology helps people to overcome creative blocks.
thats why i am here again to talk to you. omg i also started learning spanish last month.missed so many classes till now but i can say :
