While it lasts, the niche strategy is the most profitable entrepreneurial strategy.
What all niche strategies have in common is that they are unlikely to endure forever. One threat is for the niche to be outflanked, and especially by technological change. That happened to Alcon. Fifteen years after it became a worldwide near-monopoly, somebody in Czechoslovakia invented a new cataract operation, the implant lens, in which eye muscle has to be maintained rather than dissolved. And Alcon’s solvent became history.
Another threat is if a niche becomes the main mass market. That’s what happened to the Travelers Cheque. Before World War II, a European trip for Americans was still the rare exception. Now the ...
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