Practice question · Multiple choice
Digital photography destroyed chemical film, and Kodak had invented the digital sensor. Why do incumbents so often lose to a technology they developed?
Hints
- Ask what the digital business was worth in year one compared with film.
- The failure is not a failure to see it.
Show the answer
A. Because the new market is too small to justify cannibalisation
Why
Christensen’s point is that the incumbent’s decisions are locally correct. Serving your best customers and protecting your margins is exactly what leaves the low end to someone else.
Practise Innovation and Entrepreneurship
The app has 5 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Business I is free to start.
More questions on Innovation and Entrepreneurship
- Sustaining or disruptive? Sort each pattern.
- Match each concept to its author or origin.
- A market leader polls its most profitable customers, who unanimously want better performance in the existing…
- A market leader listens carefully to its best customers and is destroyed by a cheaper, initially worse…
- Which practices belong to the lean-startup method?
- Order the lean-startup cycle for a new delivery service.
- A new technology doubles its performance every 2 years, starting at 10 while the old plateau sits at 80. Set…
- In ambidextrous organizations, the exploring unit is deliberately separated from the exploiting core because…