Sukhjot (Joti) Basi

Innovation is always perceived as something which is disruptive and may result into a new product, service or the business model.  But that is not so true.  Recently, I came across such non disruptive innovation at Mor Furniture.  If we look at the furniture industry, it is a commodity business with low barriers to entry and competitive pricing.  Most of the furniture is made in China and other third world countries and shipped to US in bulk containers.  Furniture outlets go out of business every now and then and more often during the current economic crisis.  Yet, Mor furniture in Kent, WA was packed compared to other furniture stores in the area just a couple of weekends ago.  It makes one wonder about the secret behind Mor winning the business.

It is always interesting to see how small startups will come up with game changing ideas and revolutionize the entire industry.  Came across a rather interesting presentation on HP's introduction of a calculator, which was a game changer not only in the mathematical and engineering fields.  It literally killed the slide rule...and gave some releif to poor folks like me who had to read through log tables in high school (anyone else in the club?).   Not only that it also enabled HP to become a strong IT giant and resulted in several innovations in IT.  Here goes the link to that presentation.

While riding a bus to and from work, I read this article on HBR titled What's Your Google Strategy.   While I feel that article title was bit misleading, nevertheless it is a great article for those who are looking to form startegic partnerships.  By using examples such as dispute between Amazon.com and Toy R Us,  Nokia's push for Symbian, Time Warner's support for HD DVD format and LinkedIn's dual strategy with Google Open Social - this article throughly discusses pros and cons of forming strategic partnerships and things to consider beforing looking for a startegic partner.  The article encrouages managers to consider their own and potential partner's long tail and short tail strategies beforing moving forward with a partnerships.  It particularly suggests that one should carefully evaluate their partner's long term strategy by using Toys R Us example on how the relationship with Amazon went sour and ended up costing Toys R Us millions of dollars because they did not evalute Amazon's long term goals before hosting a store inside Amazon.

These days capital preservation is the mantra and bean counters at large and small corporations are in-charge.    But the bean counters who usually make their decisions based on DCF & NPV (two very useful tools) can kill innovation.  A great example is how GM lost all the value it had built by launching a strong brand like Saturn.  This article talks about how they did it.

While reading HBR, I came across a rather interesting article on How to compete in capital intensive industries.  Interestingly enough contrary to the the common wisdom, this article actually  suggests that it is not always a good idea to use game theory (something which B-Schools heavily emphasize on) just because you are threatened by your competitor .