About this item
It used to take years or even decades for disruptive innovations to dethrone dominant products and services. But now any business can be devastated virtually overnight by something better and cheaper. How can executives protect themselves and harness the power of Big Bang Disruption?Just a few years ago, drivers happily spent more than $200 for a GPS unit. But as smartphones exploded in popularity, free navigation apps exceeded the performance of stand-alone devices. Eighteen months after the debut of the navigation apps, leading GPS manufacturers had lost 85 percent of their market value.Consumer electronics and computer makers have long struggled in a world of exponential technology improvements and short product life spans. But until recently, hotels, taxi services, doctors, and energy companies had little to fear from the information revolution.
About the Author
Larry Downes is a Internet industry analyst and speaker on developing business strategies in an age of constant disruption caused by information technology.Downes is author of the Business Week and New York Times business bestseller, "Unleashing the Killer App: Digital Strategies for Market Dominance" (Harvard Business School Press, 1998), which has sold nearly 200,000 copies and was named by the Wall Street Journal as one of the five most important books ever published on business and technology.His forthcoming book, "Big Bang Disruption," (co-authored with Paul F. Nunes), will be published in late 2013. It argues that the nature of disruptive innovation has changed, and presents twelve new rules for innovators in companies large and small to take advantage of the new opportunities of better and cheaper technologies.He has written for a variety of publications, including Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Harvard Business Review, Inc., Wired, CNET, Strategy & Leadership, CIO, The American Scholar and the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology. He was a columnist for both The Industry Standard and CIO Insight.Downes has held faculty appointments at The University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, Northwestern University School of Law, and the University of California-Berkeley's Haas School of Business, where he taught courses on corporate strategy and technology law. From 2006-2011, he was a Fellow with the Stanford Law School Center for Internet & Society.
