Maximizing Moore
Moore's first book, Crossing the Chasm, is easily prescriptive in that it had one message:
- there is a continuum of technology adoption spread consecutively from innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards that is dichotymous in that innovators act differently than early adopters, and that
- early adopters are separated in their buying behavior from the early majority by specific buying traits, like willingness to take risks on products and technologies that don't have clearly defined reasons to buy the product, not just that it is a cool new product.
Moore's Dealing With Darwin addresses all the other strategies that Chasm ignores. Not only is there a single way to cross the chasm (identify a single specific order-of-magnitude leap in benefits), there are multiple other strategies that address other chasm-like challenges at each stage, not in the technology adoption cycle, but in the corporate life cycle. Early stage firms need to worry about crossing the chasm, yes. Later stage firms (already rapidly growing, or, horrors, in decline) have a whole series of other strategies they could address. Recognizing that they have an opportunity to choose a good strategy is the first step. Choosing a strategy - and here things get good - actually adopting it, is the second step.
Chasm addresses a specific need for early stage companies that need to make it past the innovators and early adopters in their market place. Darwin has a whole other group of strategies to choose from when growth has begun and for each of the other stages that succeed growth.
Organizing your company to take advantage of specific strategies makes sense as profits increase, and, in fact, odds of survival of the firm increase, as well.
Two examples:
Researchers at Cornel University (Economist) are using CAT scans of fabric to help software engineer better looking textures for animated movies. If a company is formed around this technology, it'll need not only a patent or copyright on the algorithm, but a complete business plan that makes the case that there is something here for the general marketplace, that, essentially, this is more than a button on existing software, and that there is enough here for a company addressing not just the early adopters, but the main market.
Alternatively, a mainstream company, Intel, is hiring sci-fi writers (King) to help it come up with unthought-of new ways to package technology. Intel certainly isn't early stage. It's using a new way of looking at its current product lines to figure out how to, for instance, pack more transistors on a chip, or, perhaps, figure how to to make a chip with fewer transistors that is just a good as the old chip. The sci-fi writers dream up things that have been done before (in a sci-fi novel, perhaps) and suggest its applicability to current thinking. Intel is far beyond the early growth stages. It is, however, considering how to revamp what it is doing, to sell more of the next iteration of its current products, or, maybe, create new simpler products, that just happen to use fewer transistors. This is probably more of an enhancement innovation (Moore, Darwin, 62) from Intel's point of view, not a disruptive innovation an early stage company might use.
References
Fabricating Fabric. Economist. 13 August 2011. 76.
King, Ian. To Boldly Go Where No Chip Has Gone Before. Bloomberg Businessweek. 15-28 August 2011. 38.
Moore, Geoffrey A. Crossing the Chasm. Marketing and selling high-tech product to mainstream customers. HarperBusiness. 1991. (Soft-back edition, 1995.)
Moore, Geoffrey A. Dealing With Darwin. How great companies innovate at every phase of their evolution. Portfolio. 2005.