Managing the New Venture
Every new project is an infant and infants belong in the nursery.
Innovative efforts, especially those aimed at developing new businesses, products, or services, should normally report directly to the “executive in charge of innovation.” They should never report to line managers charged with responsibility for ongoing operations. Unfortunately, this is a common error.
The new project is an infant and will remain one for the foreseeable future, and infants belong in the nursery. The “adults,” that is, the executives in charge of existing businesses or products, will have neither time nor understanding for the infant project. The best-known practitioners of this approach are three American companies: Product & Gamble, the soap, detergent, edible oil, and food producer; Johnson & Johnson, the hygiene and health-care supplier; and 3M, a major manufacturer of industrial and consumer products. These three companies differ in the details of practice, but essentially all three have the same policy. They set up the new venture as a separate business from the beginning and put a project manager in charge.
Calculated Obsolescence
Being the one who makes your products, process, or service obsolete is the only way to prevent your competitor from doing so.
Innovating organization spend neither time nor resources on defending yesterday. Systematic abandonment of yesterday alone can free the resources, and especially the scarcest resource of them all, capable people, for work on the new.
Your being the one who makes your product, process, or service obsolete is the only way to prevent your competitor from doing so. One major American company that has long understood and accepted this is DuPont. When nylon came out in 1938, DuPont immediately put chemists to work to invent new synthetic fibers to compete with nylon . it also began to cut nylon’s price-thus making it less attractive for would-be competitors to find a way around DuPont’s patents. This explains why DuPont is still the world’s leading synthetic-fiber maker, and why DuPont’s nylon is still in the market, and profitably so.