Books
The Wide Lens
A path-breaking perspective on innovation.
How to innovate in a world of ecosystems: breakthrough methods to help you and your team eliminate your strategy blind spots and multiply your odds of success.
How can great companies do everything right—identify real customer needs, deliver excellent innovations, beat their competitors to market—and still fail?
The truth is that many companies fail because they focus too intensely on their own innovations, while neglecting the ecosystems on which their success depends. In our increasingly interdependent world, winning requires more than just delivering on your own promises. It means ensuring that a host of partners—some visible, some hidden—deliver on their promises, too.
Ron Adner draws on over a decade of research and field testing to reveal the hidden structure of success, from Michelin’s failed run-flat tires to Apple’s path to market dominance. The Wide Lens offers a powerful new set of frameworks and tools that will multiply your odds of innovation success.
Reviews
This is a path-breaking perspective on innovation. Adner's tools guide you to ask the right questions to protect you from making mistakes that condemn so many innovations to failure.
—CLAYTON CHRISTENSEN, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma.
Ron Adner is a breakthrough thinker. He zooms out to see more clearly how — and why — some innovations take hold, and others do not. Adner's core insight is profound, that an innovation's success depends on its place in an entire ecosystem, and his concepts can help people turn inspired creativity into practical impact and market success. A significant contribution.
—JIM COLLINS, author of Good to Great and How the Mighty Fall, coauthor of Built to Last and Great by Choice.
An important new book on innovation. The Wide Lens will help big and small companies grow faster.
—JEFF IMMELT, CEO, General Electric.
The Wide Lens will change the way you think about innovation.
—JOHN DONAHOE, CEO, eBay.
Engaging, insightful, and immensely practical. Success in today's economy requires mastery of your innovation ecosystems, and The Wide Lens is the definitive guidebook to this new landscape.
—KEVIN SHARER, CEO, Amgen.
Adner describes the landscape of innovation in the most complete terms ever achieved. The arrival of this book is a major event for leaders everywhere.
—ADAM BRANDENBURGER, author of Co-opetition.
Anyone involved in moving a product from conception to adoption will not want to let this book pass them by.
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.
Opens the readers’ eyes to the bigger picture. Don’t miss out on your opportunity to see your innovation go from conception to success by engaging a wider lens.
—JACK COVERT SELECTS, 800ceoread.
As Ron Adner makes crystal clear if you do not think about the needs of your co-innovators, or the chain of adopters that helps it get all the way into the hands of your end users, you are likely to find yourself stranded on the wrong side of the chasm, looking longingly at the customers that could have been yours.
—GEOFFREY MOORE, author of Crossing the Chasm.
Essential reading for innovators.
—KIRKUS REVIEWS.