Innovate the Future: A Radical New Approach to IT Innovation

11. Innovate to Conquer

Conquering a dominant opponent does not mean duplicating the opponent’s products or capabilities. To conquer, you must create a product that steals the transformative value of the dominant opponent and then not follow the same negative paths of the incumbent dominant company.

Business Life Cycles Revisited

As we discussed in Chapter 4, “Business Life Cycles,” there are potentially thousands of different ways to view the activities surrounding a product, market, or company. We covered a baseline of business life cycles that map directly to the innovation life cycle, as depicted in Figure 11.1.

Figure 11.1 The business life cycles

To conquer an existing dominant competitor, you must understand where that competitor is ...