March 2014
Intermediate to advanced
256 pages
6h 9m
English
Content preview from The Lean Enterprise: How Corporations Can Innovate Like StartupsBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 9
Incubate Internally
Of the three enterprise innovation strategies—incubating, investing, and acquiring—incubating internally is the hardest. You're creating something out of nothing: You're on the hook for brilliant ideas. Moreover, your startups begin with zero momentum, and you're responsible for bringing them to fruition by using internal resources. They might have to compete for internal resources, or even with products that are the company's bread and butter.
Maybe that's why enterprises have proven so bad at incubation. Take Microsoft. The company that built an industry around MS-DOS and then Windows is no slouch at innovation, yet even the monarch of the desktop operating system wasn't able to generate success with two major internal projects, Zune and Surface. (On the other hand, Xbox is a striking counterpoint, and a very successful one at that.)
Zune was a notorious failure. The purported iPod killer, launched in 2006 five years after Apple's wildly successful music player, generated $117 million in revenue during Q4 2008 compared to iPod's $3.37 billion around the same time. Microsoft finally laid it to rest in 2012.
Perhaps it's too soon to be sure about Surface, but early indications don't look good. In July 2013, the company slashed prices and announced a $900 million charge on the device, equivalent to a loss of $0.07 per share. Incidentally, neither product was a disruptive innovation; both were me-too follow-ups to Apple's success.
Incubating disruptive ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.