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Welcome to Soundview's summary of The Wide Lens: A New Strategy for Innovation, written by
Ron Adner.
Adner has spent the past decade studying the root causes of innovation success
and failure.
He is an award-winning professor of strategy at the Tuck School of Business
at Dartmouth College and a speaker and consultant to companies around the
world.
In The Wide Lens, Adner urges us not to focus exclusively on our own
company's innovations, but rather view them as part of an innovation ecosystem.
This is because it's often not enough for companies to identify customer needs,
deliver great products, and beat their competition to market to successfully
innovate.
Success can depend on whether a host of partners in your innovation ecosystem,
some visible, some hidden, deliver on their promises too.
If any one of them is not on-board you will not reach your end customer.
Nevertheless, managers and executives are increasingly being pushed into more
collaboration to accomplish greater things with greater efficiency.
The transition from managing stand-alone products to integrated solutions is
demanding a new set of tools and systems to address interdependence challenges
and an understanding of co-innovation risk.
The Wide Lens offers some guidance on how to map an ecosystem: identify
dependencies and choose which partner will take the lead.
The best news is ultimately, in a successful ecosystem, leaders and
followers both prosper.
The Wide Lens is summarized by Soundview Executive Book Summaries with permission
from the publisher, Portfolio Penguin. Enjoy the summary.