The End of Competitive Advantage

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Building an Innovation Proficiency

In far too many companies, the life of innovations resembles Thomas Hobbes’s despairing characterization of the human condition: “nasty, brutish, and short.” The fundamental problem is that in a world dominated by those pursuing exploitation, the innovation process is light amusement at best, a dangerous threat at worst. A broken innovation process guarantees that your organization will struggle to keep its edge as competitors catch up to whatever you were doing before. You should be thinking of how to avoid the cycle of success, decline, downsizing, near death, desperation, bet the company, and revival that characterizes so many corporate histories (such as Nokia, IBM, Procter & Gamble, and many others). ...