March 19, 2012, 11:01 AM — For years, Ron Adner has heard about the same problems from clients with the same questions for him as an innovation consultant, chief among them being the age-old puzzle of why some seemingly great products fail while others succeed.
How was Apple able to succeed with the iPod when other music players whose designs were just as interesting and that did all the same things as the iPod failed to take off? Why did Amazon's Kindle find acceptance while other e-readers sat on store shelves? Why do so many great products fail, even though it appears that those behind them did everything right? The list of failures is large, but so is the list of successes. It was clear to Adner over years of research that the difference between failure and success wasn't about product design or being first on the market with a new product -- witness Apple with its penchant for entering markets late and then owning them in a short time.
"If you don't know how to look beyond your own innovation, you're setting yourself up for failure," said Adner, whose new book "The Wide Lens: A New Strategy for Innovation," explains the tools that he has found that consistently work to drive success. Key among them is to first understand the interdependence involved in success, with suppliers, distributors, retailers and customers all playing a role in the innovation and product ecosystems. Looking at all of those elements is the "wide lens" that Adner refers to in the book, which was published recently by the Portfolio imprint of Penguin.
Failing to take any one of them into account, viewing them as anything less than co-innovators, is a recipe for disaster. "It won't matter if you've created miracles," said Adner, who is also an associate professor of Business Administration at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.
The process that leads to success seems trickier than it really is, in his estimation. "It's tricky if you don't know the trick," he said. "The way I try to lay this out is to say that when people think about innovation what we already know to worry about is to satisfy the customer and great execution. This is all necessary, but when we collaborate, that's not enough for success." And all innovation these days necessarily relies on collaboration.
The book explains, complete with diagrams, how innovation and product ecosystems work and interact, and why it's critical to understand "that your success now depends not just on your own efforts but on your collaborators' efforts as well," according to the introduction. "Success in a connected world requires that you manage your dependence."
