Strategic Innovation: The Definitive Guide to Outlier Strategies

1. Introduction

For the Strategists Reading This Book

Johann Sebastian Bach composed The Well-Tempered Clavier for a keyboard instrument, or Clavier, without knowledge of the newly invented piano in Italy.¹ Since then, many leading artists have recorded his famous piece on piano. Leonardo da Vinci invented the flying machine long before airplanes ever came to exist. Arpanet—the predecessor to the Internet—came to exist before e-mail, Skype, or social media were even conceived of.

¹http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/639313/The-Well-Tempered-Clavier-BWV-846-893.

This book is about such inventions, which have great impact before they have actually happened; it is a book about what we call “strategic novelty.” Strategic novelty may seem ...