The Manager's View

If your company is a market leader it is potentially vulnerable to attacks from disruptive innovations. Clayton Christensen defines disruptive innovations as new market entrants that develop “good enough” products to serve a market leader’s least profitable customer. These least profitable customers are the result of the market leaders efforts to continually improve its products to better serve its most profitable customer. Every time a market leader develops a product enhancement to serve its very best customers, it also creates a pool of customers that no longer want or need the new enhancements. These customers that are “left behind” have a value, in that they use the product but are less profitable than those customers who adopt and pay premium prices for the new product attributes. Christensen gives as one example, the displacement of vertically integrated steel mills by mini mills in several product categories. In the beginning, mini mills discovered they could ...

In my last post I gave the first look at a new product development process used by a team of MBA students at the University of Houston. Below is the final report by a second team of students. You will note that the process is very similar ( you would expect as much since they were my students in the same class) to the one used in the previous post. The classes that worked with real world clients used the same approach and the results were well received by the client companies. Again, the processes used for these projects are described in my new book, Developing Successful Marketing Strategies, available at Amazon.com. Beginning in September I will be teaching a Consulting Practicum. For this course, one or two companies per semester are selected to work with a team of select MBA students. Each company is matched with 4 to 5 MBA students that focus their efforts for the semester on a specific objective determined by the client company. The objective can be marketing, operations, fin...