The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth

CHAPTER ONE

THE GROWTH IMPERATIVE

Financial markets relentlessly pressure executives to grow and keep growing faster and faster. Is it possible to succeed with this mandate? Don’t the innovations that can satisfy investors’ demands for growth require taking risks that are unacceptable to those same investors? Is there a way out of this dilemma?

This is a book about how to create new growth in business. Growth is important because companies create shareholder value through profitable growth. Yet there is powerful evidence that once a company’s core business has matured, the pursuit of new platforms for growth entails daunting risk. Roughly one company in ten is able to sustain the kind of growth that translates into an above-average increase ...