The theoretical analysis of the innovation spiral

Abstract

One manifestation of this wide-spread business paradigm is the phenomenon that decision-makers in companies of different kinds of industries are launching a rising number of new products within increasingly shorter time intervals. These decisionmakers do so for various reasons thereby provoking a number of possible consequences. The purpose of this chapter is to identify these potential forces and outcomes as well as the relationships between them and to put them in a framework for deeper analysis.

One of the major business paradigms prevalent since the late 1980s can be summarized in a simple statement: You have got to make it, market it, and sell it not just better, but faster than your rivals since time is money. Or, as Guaspary (Guaspary 1992) notes “Time is the most precious commodity. Each moment is unique and unrecoverable. (..) Delivering value to customers is what business is ultimately about, and the thing customers value most is time”.

Moreover, business reality seems to teach us that not the big companies are swallowing the small ones but rather fast firms will wipe away their slow competitors. Because speed kills the competition (Dumaine 1989). Abraham Lincoln’s famous statement “Things will come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle” (Großfeld 1994) may well be transferred from the world of politics to the reality of market shares: In sum, being faster than one’s competitors is more and more referred to as the major competitive advantage.