The Slow Pace of Fast Change: Bringing Innovations to Market in a Connected World [Hardcover]

Bhaskar Chakravorti (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 12, 2003

Innovation's encounter with the market results in a game of both high risk and high stakes. Often its outcome defies common sense: superior new products flop, unlikely ideas become runaway hits, and - despite rapid technological advances and intense interconnectedness - change happens at a snail's pace. What really happens during this encounter? How can you increase your own odds on this complex game board?In "The Slow Pace of Fast Change", Bhaskar Chakravorti peels back the many factors that govern an innovation's penetration into interconnected markets - and offers a game plan for successfully steering innovations from the lab to the living room. Chakravorti explains the vagaries of market adoption by highlighting a paradox in the widely celebrated concept of network effects: while everyone loves a great idea, individuals will embrace it only if they believe others will too. In markets with strong interconnections among participants, this "equilibrium" slows adoption and protects the status quo - despite the innovation's clear superiority. To win, innovators must unravel this status quo equilibrium and replace it with one built around their own innovations. The key is to imagine a desired plausible endgame, and work backward to orchestrate the network of individual choices to create conditions that make this outcome happen.Drawing on Chakravorti's hands-on experience with many of the best-known innovating companies and insights gleaned from his expertise in the practical applications of game theory, this playbook offers go-to-market strategies for: qualifying endgames to guide current choices, selectively enabling "influencers" to propagate the innovation across the network, closing deals with influencers that are "win-win," and judging the nature of uncertainty to decide how firmly to commit to the strategy. "The Slow Pace of Fast Change" shows how to leverage interconnected individual choices in ways that ensure your innovation will win when it meets the market.Bhaskar Chakravorti is Partner and Thought Leader at Monitor Group, the global strategy firm. He leads Monitor's practice advising the world's preeminent companies on growth strategies through the practical application of game theory.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Bhaskar Chakravorti is a partner in the global strategy practice at Monitor Group in Cambridge, MA.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press (June 12, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 157851780X
• ISBN-13: 978-1578517800
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #323,387 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Paradoxes of Successful Innovation, July 17, 2003

By 

Robert Morris (Dallas, Texas) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Slow Pace of Fast Change: Bringing Innovations to Market in a Connected World (Hardcover)

As the subtitle correctly indicates, Chakravorti explains how to bring innovations to market in a connected world. His contributions in this book to our understanding of both the difficulties and opportunities to do so are substantial. Acknowledging his academic roots, he acknowledges that he "developed an appreciation for a first- principles approach to strategy and decisions...how first principles translate into the framing of trade-offs and lead to timely action." Over time, he learned that true insight "comes from connecting the dots across multiple landscapes [and that] such dots lurk in the unlikeliest corners." He allows his reader to recognize those "corners" and to accompany him as he carefully but rigorously explores the connected world.

I especially appreciate his dry but delightful wit, perhaps most evident in the final chapter whose head note is a quotation from Thelonious Monk: "You know what's the loudest noise in the world, man? The loudest noise in the world is silence." Without apparent effort, he invites his reader to consider the significance of the Galton-Gould evolutionary pool table, a metaphor which suggests that a market is the polyhedron-shaped ball." perhaps recalling John Nash's insight, he suggests that when innovation arrives on the scene (i.e. in a market), it creates disequilibrium. "It is in this situation of rest [i.e. when the "ball" has stopped] which may be viewed as gridlock by some and as a stable market by others -- that innovations in a connect must pry apart."

Given the process of inquiry and exploration which has been completed in the prior chapters, I was intrigued by how Chakravorti achieves at least a temporary synthesis of so many different (sometimes contradictory) factors which interact throughout the innovation cycle: "the eureka moment; the development of technology to give life to an idea; and the creation of an organization to produce and commercialize the innovation." As we all know, few innovative ideas ever reach their intended market and fewer yet survive thereafter. There is indeed a natural selection process during any campaign to bring an innovation into the connected world. Chakravorti suggests four aspects of that campaign:

1. "Qualifying the endgame and, in the process, choosing between several strategic options at the outset;

2. "Orchestrating the changes necessary across the network of players through a mechanism that propagates the innovator's selective interventions into the wider network;

3. "Actively managing with the critical agents that will pass on the innovation's influence; and

4. "Making appropriate choices on how to commit to strategies that lead to certain endgames in the face of uncertainty -- depending on the situation, one must choose between making a bet, reserving options, and seeking insurance."

Paraphrasing an ancient aphorism, Chakravorti suggests that market imperfection is the mother of innovation because it creates the need to innovate both in terms of a given product or service and in terms of the campaign by which to guide it to market. and then through natural selection to at least temporary security....that is, until another innovation (which accommodates the aforementioned four aspects) eliminates the need for it.

I agree completely with Chakravorti that the "slow pace of change is good news for the strategic innovator. In fact, it is essential news." Obviously, when any organization plans to take a new product or service to market, it faces formidable competition and all manner of challenges, only some of which are posed by competitors. (How many innovative products or services have never survived internal barriers which may include what Jim O'Toole has characterized as "the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom") In this brilliant book, Chakravorti suggests a number of specific strategies and tactics to help achieve market penetration and eventual success in a connected world. There is also an important lesson to be learned from one of Aesop's fable, "The Tortoise and the Hare": At least in some situations, only a "slow pace" can achieve "fast change."

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Delightfully written on a truly complex and timely topic, May 30, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Slow Pace of Fast Change: Bringing Innovations to Market in a Connected World (Hardcover)

This is one of the best written books I have read in a long time. The author must have pored over the crafting of every word. It is a serious book and yet it is quite a funny book. Overall it is clear he knows what he is talking about in terms of how real companies act and the game theory behind their actions. And it is about something that most people I know think a lot about. The book is on bringing innovations and new ideas to market. I read it as having much wider social and political consequences because it really does offer a way for us to understand how things work -- or don't -- in our super-connected world. With terrorism and SARS and globalization risks and the proliferation of the internet we are really connected in so many ways. I came away from the Slow Pace of Fast Change with, as the author puts it, a new "mindset" to understand and even strategize in this interconnected reality, where the network is both your best friend and your worst enemy. I know of Moore's law as the rule of the 90s--like everyone else I and everyone else I know lived and breathed it. Slow Pace...will I think give us a rule that may last even longer: Demi Moore's law. Cute, but really quite brilliant if you think about it.
Every chapter in the book helps develop a rich set of ideas interwoven with really well-told tales of strategic games among the best known companies in the world -- and even some that have since flamed out, for reasons the book helped make me understand. The tales of real world games among AT&T, the Chinese, WorldCom, Comcast, Microsoft read like a novel. Even though that particular chapter had the least new material in terms of concepts, the stories and strategic analyses alone made its presence more than worthwhile.
A deceptively easy read but it's deep stuff. I would read it again.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Where "The Tipping Point" and "Information Rules" leave off, May 23, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Slow Pace of Fast Change: Bringing Innovations to Market in a Connected World (Hardcover)

Skimming through the index alone reveals why this book is special. Where else will you find Christina Aguilera, Aerosmith, Nash equilibrium, Larry Ellison, Enron, Prozac, Napoleon, Paul Krugman, Star Trek, Shimon Peres and Napster all wrapped up in a highly compelling, intellectually rich and intensely practical story of why true progress is slow (despite the predictions of the gurus) -- and what you can do to speed innovation's journey to market? I found this book to be where Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point and Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian's Information Rules left off. Highly entertaining (don't miss the last chapter which is a children's story with a surprise ironic twist) and makes you think. It will certainly make me change the way I will make decisions in my own business and taking our own R&D to market. A book that is highly relevant for the present time of uncertainty about economic and tech recovery and will be a classic over the longer term. Unlike the slew of business books --that are mercifully fewer these days-- that filled the shelves of bookstores during the 90s, this one actually is very well written, has delightful puns and unusual stories of innovation and seamlessly draws on both high theory and what appears to be intimate knowledge of hands-on practice.

My only complaint: needs more graphics and summaries at the end of each chapter for me to have the overflow of insights handy.