Harvard Business Publishing

Great post!

You are precisely right. The success does not come when you have lured the targeted market group, rather when you have successfully brought in the non-targeted market. Exactly the example you gave with the nintendo wii vs the playstation 3. Great WorK!

Very apth! Futuristic approach create greater and sustainable value than an Immediate gain from early break thoughs!

Scott,

Thank you for a great post. This is exactly what I see companies struggling with these days. Where many have taken steps towards meeting growing demands of the market place for new and better offerings, not many have cracked the magic formula for how to recognize a good thing when it is lterally right under your nose.

The best results I have seen so far is where the companies set money aside into a "trust-fund" for the experts to invest into what the experts believe creates value. The successful ones require work within both types of Innovation you have described; Innovation A - to meet already identified market needs, and Innovation B to discover and create new demand with ideas and projects that do not deliver immediate returns nevertheless create passion with their developers.

Best regards,
Renata

Completely agree.

Companies will miss innovation type B opportunities big time. Most importantly, they may not become aware of it until it is too late. Is there any way that a company could do to prevent this type of missing opportunities from happening? What would be the things that a company could do to get better at this proactively? Or just pending on who is on at the time to when the decision is made, right or wrong, luck of draw?

Too often, people at the position are not being able to make the right choice due to the short-term goals that they have been slated. On the other hand, they are the people who will determine what future projects are a company will focus their capital investment/talent on. So the key solution to this problem would be to have the right people in charge of this critical business aspect who will not have any short-term revenue goals to answer. Then this person can lead a right team so that they can constantly, effectively and consistently evaluate opportunities and reevaluate opportunities to ensure that right ones being pursued at the right time to maximize a business long-term investment.

Eventually, this business practice will yield great returns short-term in addition to be long-term effective since a well built business will run its healthy cycles. As one can tell, long-term goal earlier will become short-term instruments later on to earn the much needed revenue to report to the street…

This is a gerat post as it shows the basic difference about two well known companies and their idea of selling their particular product.

When the rules of the game are known, the windows of opportunity have long been closed.

In a normal business environment a Google search machine business plan would have been killed immediately.

Sounds like the Toyota-style Kaizen approach:-)

We should invent new future value seeing glasses for managers, that would help a lot;-)

Cheers,

Ralf