Ron Adner - The Wide Lens: What Successful Innovators See That Others Miss

Praise for The Wide Lens

The Wide Lens will change the way you think about innovation. Adner shows why and how you must adapt your approach to innovation in todays interdependent world. This is highly useful reading for anyone whose success depends on collaboration.

John Donahoe, President and CEO, eBay; former CEO, Bain & Company

The Wide Lens is an important new book on innovation. Ron correctly identifies the important challenge of recognizing market ecosystem and competitive strategies. His framework for innovation is contemporary, teachable, and practical. Growth is todays big challenge. The Wide Lens will help big and small companies grow faster.

Jeffrey R. Immelt, Chairman and CEO, General Electric Corporation

As Ron Adner makes crystal clear, when it comes to proliferating a successful innovation, it takes a village! And if you do not think about the needs of your co-innovators, or the chain of adopters that helps it get all the way into the hands of your end users, you are likely to find yourself stranded on the wrong side of a chasm, looking longingly at the customers that could have been yours.

Geoffrey Moore, author of Crossing the Chasm and Escape Velocity

What is the big picture? This is a question that haunts every business strategistreflecting the fear that our analysis of the landscape has missed the larger threats or opportunities in front of us. Based on years of research and teaching, The Wide Lens gives a brilliant answer. Ron Adner describes the landscape of innovation in the most complete terms ever achieved. The arrival of this book is a major event for leaders everywhere.

Adam Brandenburger, J.P. Valles Professor, NYU
Stern School of Business; coauthor of Co-opetition

Essential reading for innovators.

Kirkus Reviews

The Wide Lens opens the readers eyes to the bigger picture and expands the mind to the possible pitfalls that have come to stand in the way of the success of many innovative products and services.... Dont miss out on your opportunity to see your innovation go from conception to success by engaging a wider lens.

Jack Covert Selects, 800ceoread

Ron Adner has spent the past decade studying the root causes of innovation success and failure. An award-winning professor of strategy at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, and previously at INSEAD, he is a speaker and consultant to companies around the world. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Forbes, and the Harvard Business Review.

PORTFOLIO/PENGUIN

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

New York, New York 10014, USA

USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China

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For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com

First published in the United States of America by Portfolio/Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2012

This revised paperback edition with a new preface published 2013

Copyright Ron Adner, 2012, 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this product may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS :

Adner, Ron.

The wide lens : a new strategy for innovation / Ron Adner.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN: 978-1-101-56132-4

1. Technological innovationsManagement. 2. New products. I. Title.

HD45.A46 2012

658.575dc23

2011041760

Designed by Elyse Strongin and Neuwirth & Associates

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

To my students, who have made the journey so rewarding.

And to my family, who have made it possible.

When I started working on innovation ecosystems over a decade ago, the very concept was still relatively new. That has changed. What began as an academic idea has now emerged as a powerful real-world theme in the modern global economy.

The central message of The Wide Lens is that the ultimate success of any innovation effort no longer depends on you alone. While it is important to understand your customers and your competition, there is now a third consideration: the ability to recognize and align the critical partners on whom your success depends. This is what it means to navigate and win within your innovation ecosystem.

In the year since The Wide Lens was first published, its been gratifying to hear how it has resonated with readers across the economic spectrum, from corporate leaders, entrepreneurs, and investors in the private sector, to policy makers, administrators, and community organizers in the public sector. The reality is that everyone today is impacted by the challenges and opportunities of innovation ecosystemswhether they recognize it or not.

Once you broaden your perspective to include your ecosystem, you can achieve a remarkable level of new insight. Each case in this book is an innovation mysterya failure or success that traditional strategy tools simply cannot explain. But when we apply the Wide Lens approach to the problem, we will find that each one cracks according to a clear logic. This is the hallmark of powerful theorytaking a problem that seems impenetrable at the start and, by applying a consistent and systematic approach, making it look obvious at the end.

I wrote The Wide Lens to help readers develop a new set of intuitions for how to think about strategy and innovation. But intuition alone is only a partial solution. For while having the right intuition helps you get to the right answer, you also have to convince the people around you and set of a course of actions to take. It is for this reason that I developed the tools and frameworks in the book, and it is here that I think the book is having its greatest impactin actually changing the conversation within organizations.

Beyond the stories and cases, the book offers a powerful structure for discussion and analysis. The frameworks help teams ask a clear set of questions, and the tools help structure coherent answers. Every chapter and every tool can be applied directly to your own teams and initiatives. For a general management dialogue, you can read each chapter and ask, What would have been different had this taken place in our organization? What processes do we have in place to make sure we dont fall victim to the same blind spots? For a specific initiative, you can apply the tools in sequence to build a better strategy to safeguard your success.