The Dark Side of Innovation Audio Summary [Part I]

Here is the audio summary of The Dark Side of Innovation. If you have not read the book yet, this summary should give you a fairly good overview of the concepts covered in the book in around 45 minutes. If you have already read the book, it may help you spark new ideas.

This week, we did a new professional recording of this audio summary for the blog and are releasing it in two parts.

How The Dark Side of Innovation Leads to Failure of Firms

Although innovation is the holy grail of business, sometimes it incarnates itself in the dark form. In this form, it becomes a curse on the incumbents. Whether they embrace such innovation or avoid them, they end up as a loser. In front of the dark side of innovation, firms become helpless; their strategies become ineffective, and their managers become their worst enemies.

The Dark Side of Innovation is responsible for disruption of hundreds of firms.

What is the dark side of innovation?

When a change threatens to destroy your profits instead of helping you enhance profits, I call it a profit destroying changes. These changes create cognitive illusions for a firm and managers facing them. Since the truth often evades managers, it remains hidden from view. It remains on the dark side of cognition. This is the second reason why I termed these innovations collectively as The Dark Side of Innovation.

Why is the Dark Side of Innovation so challenging?

Due to cognitive challenges such innovations create, they make firms choose the wrong path. This wrong path lulls firms initially and then leave them vulnerable to disruption. The book takes you through dozens of such stories. The cognitive challenges posed by profit destroying innovations link results of Nobel-Prize winning research by Kahneman and Tversky with the world of innovation.

Key Takeaways

This first part of the audio summary describes three industry examples from the dark side of innovation. It also explains why the dark side of innovation is so challenging. You will take away the following from it:

1. What is the dark side of innovation?
2. What is the challenge of the dark side of innovation?
3. Why does dark side of innovation results in disruption?
4. What is a profit destroying innovation?
5. Why Kodak, Polaroid, Fidelity, and the Swiss watchmakers behaved the same when faced with profit destroying innovations?