How Industries Change
For exclusive use at Indian Institute of Management - Calcutta, 2015
www.hbr.org
Industries follow distinctive change trajectories.
Investments in innovation are more likely to pay off if you take those pathways into account. How Industries Change by Anita M. McGahan
Reprint R0410E
This document is authorized for use only in Strategic Management (Section-C&E) by Prof. Sushil Khanna, at Indian Institute of Management - Calcutta from January 2015 to March 2015.
For exclusive use at Indian Institute of Management - Calcutta, 2015
Industries follow distinctive change trajectories. Investments in innovation are more likely to pay off if you take those pathways into account. How Industries Change by Anita M. McGahan
COPYRIGHT © 2004 HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
You can’t make intelligent investments within your organization unless you understand how your whole industry is changing. If the industry is in the midst of radical change, you’ll eventually have to dismantle old businesses. If the industry is experiencing incremental change, you’ll probably need to reinvest in your core. The need to understand change in your industry may seem obvious, but such knowledge is not always easy to come by. Companies misread clues and arrive at false conclusions all the time. Sotheby’s, for example, invested in online auctions (its own Web site as well as a venture with Amazon) as if the Internet were just another channel; in truth, the new technology represented a fundamental shock to the industry’s structure.
To truly understand where your industry is headed, you have to shut out the noise from the popular business press and the pressure of immediate competitive threats to take a longer-term look at the context in which you do business. That is what some of my colleagues and I did. The research described in
harvard business review • october 2004
this article is based on a high-level look at a variety of businesses from a broad
www.hbr.org
Industries follow distinctive change trajectories.
Investments in innovation are more likely to pay off if you take those pathways into account. How Industries Change by Anita M. McGahan
Reprint R0410E
This document is authorized for use only in Strategic Management (Section-C&E) by Prof. Sushil Khanna, at Indian Institute of Management - Calcutta from January 2015 to March 2015.
For exclusive use at Indian Institute of Management - Calcutta, 2015
Industries follow distinctive change trajectories. Investments in innovation are more likely to pay off if you take those pathways into account. How Industries Change by Anita M. McGahan
COPYRIGHT © 2004 HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
You can’t make intelligent investments within your organization unless you understand how your whole industry is changing. If the industry is in the midst of radical change, you’ll eventually have to dismantle old businesses. If the industry is experiencing incremental change, you’ll probably need to reinvest in your core. The need to understand change in your industry may seem obvious, but such knowledge is not always easy to come by. Companies misread clues and arrive at false conclusions all the time. Sotheby’s, for example, invested in online auctions (its own Web site as well as a venture with Amazon) as if the Internet were just another channel; in truth, the new technology represented a fundamental shock to the industry’s structure.
To truly understand where your industry is headed, you have to shut out the noise from the popular business press and the pressure of immediate competitive threats to take a longer-term look at the context in which you do business. That is what some of my colleagues and I did. The research described in
harvard business review • october 2004
this article is based on a high-level look at a variety of businesses from a broad