TABLE OF CONTENTS The competencies necessary to provide customer value innovation are the same as those required to transform traditional markets into new ones or create emerging markets where none existed before.
An important skill among the executive management team is the ability to recognize early warning signs that indicate the beginnings of a market change. In the late 1970s, neither Wang Corporation management nor managers at Digital Equipment Corporation foresaw the changes on the horizon for their markets. The personal computer toppled these two giants of word processing and minicomputing, respectively. This shift was so profound that it affected even those who might not have seen any relationship between their businesses and personal computing, such as typewriter maker Smith-Corona, whose management likely never imagined that its product, the quintessential tool of secretaries and students, would go the way of the dinosaur by the mid-1980s. Even the telephone and health care industries which contribute billions to the U.S. gross national product did not fully understand the implications of personal computing for their domains.
Another competency necessary for customer value innovation is knowing what not to do and when not to do it, how to make the decision to stop doing it, and how to lead initiatives to bridge the chasm often created by disruptive innovation. Nikon, one of the early entrants into the field of...
