Business Case Studies, Executive Interviews, Geoffrey Moore on Innovation

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Executive Interviews: Interview with Geoffrey Moore on Innovation
January 2008 - By Dr. Nagendra V Chowdary


Geoffrey Moore
Managing Director, TCG Advisors,
Venture Partner, Mohr Davidow Ventures.


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  • A word about TCG Advisors.
    TCG Advisors is a strategyconsulting firm located in Silicon Valley that specializes in working with high-tech clients including Adobe, Cisco, HP, Qualcomm, and SAP. Additionally, I am a venture partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm also in Silicon Valley.

  • What gives you more satisfaction: as an author or as a consultant? In which role do you think you had made commendable contribution to the business thinking?
    Authoring creates the occasion and the vocabulary for dialog. Consulting brings those dialogs to fruition—and in the

    process inevitably changes the vocabulary. After a while the vocabulary evolves so much, you have to write a new book, and the cycle repeats itself, only stopping when your new vocabulary is either not that new or not that useful. Being in service to others is the basis of my satisfaction regardless of what part of the cycle we are in.

  • Amongst three of your books, Crossing the Chasm, Inside the Tornado and, Dealing with Darwin:How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their Evolution, which one do you think would have long-lasting impact and why?
    Crossing the Chasm is the one I am best known for. It, and its companion, Inside the Tornado, are focused on start-ups growing to maturity. By contrast, Dealing with Darwin is focused on mature enterprises and their challenges with renewing themselves. My venture work leverages the first two, my consulting work the last.

  • What is your assessment of technology startups, now? How is the scenario different from the time Crossing the Chasm was written?
    Venture startups are a much broader class today than in 1990 when the book was first written. Then most startups were in the computing sector, focusing on enterprise computing, focused on US-based customers. Today Silicon Valley startups are also in clean energy, genomic medicine, Web 2.0; they address consumer markets as well as enterprise; they focus outside the US as well as inside. All these dynamics still face chasms, but the kind of chasms they face, and the techniques for crossing them, can be different. This is a classic case where it is time to update the vocabulary.

  • You observed, "… The point of greatest peril in the development of a high-tech market lies in making the transition from an early market dominated by a few visionary customers to a mainstream market dominated by a large block of customers who are predominantly pragmatists in orientation. The gap between these two markets, heretofore ignored, is in fact so significant as to warrant being called chasm, and crossing this chasm must be the primary focus of any long-term high-tech marketing plan." How is this chasm played out in the case of Google's global forays (where major threats are coming not from business quarters, but from governments in Germany, France, Japan and China)?
    Google did not have to cross a Technology Adoption Life Cycle chasm. Yahoo, Inktomi, Ask Jeeves, and a host of others had already made search a mainstream technology. The chasm Google faces is in reorchestrating the media and advertising industry models. One of the defenses that legacy incumbents can use in such battles is political or regulatory influence, as your examples illustrate.

  • How easy or difficult is it to discover a chasm in the fastchanging technology cycles?
    Let's just say it is very easy to fall into a chasm, and once you have fallen, it is very easy to detect that you have. Foreseeing the chasm and avoiding it, on the other hand, is very challenging. Entrepreneurs, and their investors, have to assume they will fall at one point or another and therefore have to plan for how to get back on their feet quickly.

  • How do you define a great company? Does a company become a great company because it innovates continuously or is it vice versa?
    A great company serves the world in a way that causes the world to want it to thrive and grow. Typically this means it addresses a deep and pervasive need in what would otherwise be an underserved market and does so in a way that creates positive outcomes for as many as possible.

  • What are disruptive technologies and how have they influenced the business across the globe? Is it correct to assume that disruptivetechnologies are to be associated more with tech-related industries or is it that they can also be found in typical manufacturing and services sector too?
    Disruptive technologies provide a dramatic improvement in either the end result or the cost of achieving that result, but at the cost of having to abandon the established investment and transition to a new platform. They happen in all industries eventually, but much more frequently in high-tech.

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