Essential guide to protect and grow your business in increasingly uncertain times.

We are living in a world where new threats emerge each day. New technologies, new competitors, new business models and industry convergence are just a handful of challenges facing you. As a successful business leader, you are adept at facing such challenges and you are confident that you can steer your business through these hurdles and skillfully avoid the pot holes that appear in your path.

But how about the challenges heading towards you that you are unaware of? What about those challenges which are akin to quicksand. Where whether you take action or avoid action, the result will be no different: where your traditional solutions will not help you but push you deeper into the quicksand.

Kodak and Polaroid faced such a quicksand. They took all the action great companies do – Invested heavily in the new technology, built new capabilities and made organizational changes to deal with the new era. In spite of spending billions of dollars in technology and building state of the art new products, both of them found themselves in a quicksand from which they could not re-emerge.

The dark side of innovation raises your awareness of the quicksand in your path that you can neither anticipate nor deal with using traditional methods. It includes several hair raising tales of companies who could not emerge from the quicksand of profit destroying innovations and inspiring tales of firms who succeeded against great odds. Using data from dozens of companies and industries, it lays out a method to design solutions to such a quicksand that is bound to appear in your path.

The powerful tools from the book are essential elements of your strategic arsenal, significantly enhancing your odds of growing and protecting your business.

This Book is about taking your business to great heights using powerful new strategies!

The world of small business is an exciting place where passionate entrepreneurs and business leaders are trying to make their mark. However, small businesses face a host of challenges. Most small business leaders wish they had more resources and a larger footprint to go that extra mile; that little extra edge that would allow them to compete with big players without betting the farm.

The conventional strategy for small businesses is to focus on narrow niches that are not important to big players. This allows small players to remain under the radar and co-exist with large players. This makes sense because when SMEs fight big players, muscle power decides who wins. Thus it is often suicidal for small players to take on their larger brethren.

But, there is good news. There are times when a certain type of innovation or change initiated by a small player can trap a large player into inactivity.

Just as David stunned Goliath by using a weakness in Goliath’s armor, small players can use a psychological vulnerability in the armor of dominant competitors to win against them.

The dark side of innovation is the first book to show how large players often behave as deer in the headlights when faced with such innovations. It shows the Achilles’ heel in every large company that can leave it paralyzed by even a small and peripheral player.

It describes how small and peripheral firms rose to prominence and dominant positions using this secret psychological ploy. Most importantly, it gives you the recipe used by many smaller firms to successfully create such innovations.

The Dark side of Innovation:-

• Shares inspiring and moving stories of small firms defeating large incumbents
• Describes the secret nature of innovations that often paralyze large incumbents
• Provides a recipe of creating such innovations in any industry
• Helps the reader see vulnerability of large firms in a new light
• Provides a new strategic tool for SMEs willing to achieve greatness.

Be the innovator you aspire to be.

As an R&D professional, you are faced with significant innovation demands to give your business the cutting edge it so needs versus your competitors. You are adept at building an innovation pipeline and leveraging your organization to provide cutting edge innovations.

However you believe you are close to a breaking point. You secretly wish you had a magic wand to provide better and bigger innovations for your business and with fewer resources. You need a magic wind beneath your wings to propel you to deliver these demands.

The dark side of innovation provides you the recipe you are looking for. The four step process laid out in the book shows you how to leverage the various changes in your industry to be the propellant of your innovation pipeline. It helps you to ride the wave of emerging opportunities and threats in your industry along with the magic of your technology to create massive value by increasing the size of your innovation pipeline and increasing the size of prize of existing innovations.

Leverage ever changing consumer and competitive landscape to build value.

You are a proficient business builder who has the pulse of the market. You thrive in innovating to build your business. You are running at 200 miles per hour to keep your business thriving on a daily basis. At these high speeds, although you are acutely aware of many changes ahead of you, you simply do not have the time or leisure to step back and look ahead for the big opportunities and threats on a regular basis. Every minute spent away from your customer, your brands, and your markets is a wasted minute.

Deep down, you fear that something big may be lurking around the corner which you have not anticipated. You know major companies and large businesses have gone from great heights to abysmal depths due to such changes that were not anticipated.

The dark side of innovation allows you to conquer this fear efficiently and effectively. This must read book allows you to see the ever changing consumer and competitive landscape in a new light. It helps you recognize the major changes taking place in your industry and the big hidden threats that face your business. A few hours with this book will not only help you avoid the pit falls of the dark side of innovation but will allow you to formulate marketing strategies which leverage these slow and hidden changes taking place in your markets to build business value.

You owe it to yourself.

Stay ahead of the curve and deliver business innovation

You are the lifeblood of information flow in your organization. You leverage systems and technologies to deliver the maximum impact for your business. Your organization is integral to not only the day to day running of the businesses but is also linked with the future strategies of your company.

You are increasingly being called upon to step into the role of a business innovator. While a lot of your attention and investment is focused on ensuring the current systems infrastructure continues to function flawlessly, there are two critical issues that you would like to resolve.
First, while the business needs continue to change on a daily basis, your systems do not change daily. This creates a perpetual gap between business needs and your systems solutions. You want to close or eliminate this gap.
Second, as new technologies emerge regularly, you want to use them to deliver higher business value. How do you use new technologies to maximize your business results?

To solve both these issues, you need to understand the link between your business decisions and the changing context of your business. This will allow you to anticipate the upcoming changes in your industry and help you prepare your systems for the changes that will be inevitable. The same knowledge will help you understand which technologies and emerging trends can be brought together for a higher business impact.

The dark side of innovation provides you with a methodology to anticipate the changes in your industry and get ahead of the curve. This will not only allow you to step into the role of a business innovator but will also help you keep your systems solutions ready for the inevitable changes ahead of you.

As a strategy professional, whether in a consulting firm or within a corporation, you are adept at solving critical problems for your clients. Beyond designing solutions, you also play an important role in identifying and framing problems for management teams. With your training and experience, you are well aware of the various tools and techniques for identifying, framing and solving problems. However, you are in constant search for new and better tools and techniques to be more effective.

The dark side of Innovation provides a breakthrough methodology to enable you to identify and frame emerging threats to your client’s business. Based on years of research across industries, the book is a must read for those who seek to disrupt or survive disruption and for the strategists who advice them.

Provides you advanced holistic understanding of innovation and business transformation with cutting edge tools. Enables you to analyze industries and companies you are exploring for employment.

As an MBA student, you are undergoing a massive change in your mindset through your education. You are getting a tremendous exposure to the world of business in ways that you were unaware of. You are rapidly accumulating the tools and techniques across different functional areas and becoming adept at management. Your objective is to use these tools and your education to make a mark in the world of business. You not only want to get a great education but also want to get a great job after your MBA.

The Dark Side of Innovation will enable you in your pursuits in three important ways. First, it will provide you with a holistic understanding of innovation and business transformation that pulls together from many functional areas. This will help you consolidate many lessons you learnt through your business courses. Second, it will provide you with a framework to analyze an industry and any company from a powerful perspective. After this analysis, you will be able to discuss an industry and a business with senior managers in insightful terms. This will be helpful in your job interviews when you sit down and talk with senior management of any company. Third, it will help you become a better business manager as you start your first job. Irrespective of the functional domain you choose to follow in your career, the dark side of innovation promises to be a good companion.

Most of the consumer goods industry was safeguarded from disruption for over a 100 years. However, consumer good is no longer immune from disruption.

Electronics and information technology will perhaps transform many of your old products. Blades and Razors may face threats from laser based hair removal technologies. Old age tooth and hair brushes may become the new dermatologist or dentist in your hand – diagnosing you and providing you potential solutions as you go about your daily activities. The three key forces driving the age of disruption are also affecting your industry.  These forces are affecting large companies through disruptive business models.

Read about these three forces.

You need the powerful tools in the dark side of innovation to help you deal with these disruptive forces.

As a strategy professional, whether in a consulting firm or within a corporation, you are adept at solving critical problems for your clients. Beyond designing solutions, you also play an important role in identifying and framing problems for management teams. With your training and experience, you are well aware of the various tools and techniques for identifying, framing and solving problems. However, you are in constant search for new and better tools and techniques to be more effective.

The dark side of Innovation provides a breakthrough methodology to enable you to identify and frame emerging threats to your client’s business. Based on years of research across industries, the book is a must read for those who seek to disrupt or survive disruption and for the strategists who advice them.

Your industry is the hotbed of the dark side of innovation. Read my articles on the media war to understand the nature of ever increasing threats to your business.

• Understanding the Media War
• Whats Google doing in Books and Telecom

The book is a must read for anyone playing in the media industry today.

Your industry is a major enabler of disruption. Cloud computing, mobile devices, social networking and big data are all coming together to help disrupt several industry.

Read my article on how IT is helping usher in the age of disruption

Major players are getting ready for the age of disruption. Read my article on how the LinkedIn purchase helps Microsoft get ready for the new age

The book is an essential guide for IT professionals looking to disrupt to facing disruption.

Financial services is facing many disruptions from fintech. Immune from disruption for decades, your industry is now facing many disruptive forces.

A marketing head of a major Swiss bank told me she was more worried about Google, Apple and Amazon than about major banks. She was acutely aware of the disruptive forces entering the banking industry.

Read about the nature of change due to the age of disruption

The dark side of innovation is an essential guide for you as you go through the age of disruption.

You industry was immune from disruption of over a 100 years. But the forces of disruption are knocking on your door step today.

Read about what is bringing these forces to your doorsteps

There are at least 9 disruptive ideas evolving in your industry. From self driving cars, to disaster management to superior risk segmentation methods, these can potentially reduce your profits.

You must read about others who went through this same experience. Learn from their mistakes and successes in the dark side of innovation.