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Computer Wars, recount a similar story about IBM’s efforts to commercialize Reduced Instruction Set
Computing (RISC) microprocessor technology. RISC was invented at IBM, and its inventors built
computers with RISC chips that were “screamingly fast.” IBM subsequently spent massive amounts of
time, money, and manpower trying to make the RISC chip work in its main line of minicomputers. This
required so many design compromises, however, that the program was never successful. Several key
members of IBM’s RISC team left in frustration, subsequently playing key roles in establishing the
RISC chipmaker MIPS and Hewlett-Packard’s RISC chip business. These efforts were successful
because, having accepted the attributes of the product for what they were, they found a market, in
engineering workstations, that valued those attributes. IBM failed because it tried to force the
technology into a market it had already found. Interestingly, IBM ultimately built a successful business
around a RISC-architecture chip when it launched its own engineering workstation. See Charles
Ferguson and Charles Morris, Computer Wars (New York: Time Books, 1994).
8.
The notion that non-existent markets are best researched through action, rather than through passive
observation, is explored in Gary Hamel and C. K. Prahalad, “Corporate Imagination and Expeditionary
Marketing,” Harvard Business Review, July–August, 1991, 81–92.
9.
The concept that business plans dealing with disruptive innovations should be plans for learning
rather than plans for executing a preconceived strategy is taught clearly by Rita G. McGrath and Ian
MacMillan in “Discovery-Driven Planning,” Harvard Business Review, July–August, 1995, 44–54.
10.
Jeffrey Thoresen Severts, “Managing Innovation: Electric Vehicle Development at Chrysler,”
Harvard Business School MBA student paper, 1996. A copy of this paper is available on request from
Clayton Christensen, Harvard Business School.
11.
Glaub’s remarks were made in the context of the California Air Resources Board mandate that by
1998 all companies selling gasoline-powered vehicles in the state must, in order to sell any cars at all,
sell enough electric-powered vehicles to constitute 2 percent of their total vehicle unit sales in the state.
As already noted, the state government, in 1996, delayed implementation of that requirement until
2002.
12.
This statement was made by William Glaub, General Sales Manager, Field Sales Operations,
Chrysler Corporation, at the CARB Workshop on Electric Vehicle Consumer Marketability held in El
Monte, California, on June 28, 1995; see p. 5 of the company’s press release about the workshop.
13.
Ibid.
14.
It is important to note that these statistics for Chrysler’s offering were determined by Chrysler’s
efforts to commercialize the disruptive technology; they are not intrinsic to electrically powered
vehicles per se. Electric vehicles designed for different, lighter-duty applications, such as one by
General Motors, have driving ranges of up to 100 miles. (See Jeffrey Thoresen Severts, “Managing
Innovation: Electric Vehicle Development at Chrysler,” Harvard Business School student paper, 1996.)
15.
See, for example, Gabriella Stern and Rebecca Blumenstein, “GM Is Expected to Back Proposal for
Midsize Version of Saturn Car,” The Wall Street Journal, May 24, 1996, B4.
171
16.
This list of smaller, simpler, more convenient disruptive technologies could be extended to include
a host of others whose histories could not be squeezed into this book: tabletop photocopiers; surgical
staplers; portable, transistorized radios and televisions; helican scan VCRs; microwave ovens; bubble
jet printers. Each of these disruptive technologies has grown to dominate both its initial and its
mainstream markets, having begun with simplicity and convenience as their primary value
propositions.
17.
The notion that it takes time, experimentation, and trial and error to achieve a dominant product
design, a very common pattern with disruptive technologies, is discussed later in this chapter.
18.
This statement was made by John R. Wallace, of Ford, at the CARB Workshop on Electric Vehicle
Consumer Marketability held in El Monte, California, on June 28, 1995; see p. 5 of the company’s
press release.
19.
Glaub, statement made at the CARB Workshop.
20.
Two excellent articles in which the relative roles of product development and incremental versus
radical technology development are researched and discussed are Ralph E. Gomory, “From the ‘Ladder
of Science’ to the Product Development Cycle,” Harvard Business Review, November-December,
1989, 99–105, and Lowell Steele, “Managers’ Misconceptions About Technology,” Harvard Business
Review, 1983, 733–740.
21.
In addition to the findings from the disk drive study summarized in chapters 1 and 2 that
established firms were able to muster the wherewithal to lead in extraordinarily complex and risky
sustaining innovations, there is similar evidence from other industries; see, for example, Marco Iansiti,
“Technology Integration: Managing Technological Evolution in a Complex Environment,” Research
Policy 24, 1995, 521–542.
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CHAPTER ELEVEN
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