Relentless Innovation: What Works, What Doesn’t--And What That Means For Your Business

Introduction

What’s unusual about business today is how usual it is. Most successful businesses “hum” with efficiency and effectiveness. Over the past two decades, business models have been finely tuned to crank out products that meet customer needs and consistently achieve quarterly forecasts. Through these highly predictive, carefully defined approaches, corporations imagine they’ve eliminated variance, errors, and surprises. Competitive forces, global markets, and consumer demands, however, are changing how firms compete by introducing far more variance. Customers and markets demand new products and services. To fulfill those demands, firms turn to innovation, which initiates a shift from known, consistent processes to unknown or unusual ones. ...