Ron Adner > Quotes

“A great idea that excites your organization but not your customer creates no value. A great idea that you cannot implement is a theoretical dream. And a great idea that you implement, but which the competition implements better, is at best a disadvantaged effort and at worst a waste of both time and resources.”
― Ron Adner, The Wide Lens: A New Strategy for Innovation

“minimum viable ecosystem (MVE) means something else. It is not targeted at exploring consumer demand. Rather, it is targeted at aligning the partners that you need to build your value architecture and to deliver your value proposition (which, to be sure, itself must be selected on the basis of deep customer insight). The MVE is less about prototyping and more about attracting and aligning. It provides the foundation that you can use to attract an initial subset of partners, which serves to attract the second subset, then the third, and so on.”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“Establishing leadership means guiding independent partners toward your chosen goal, while allowing them to maintain their sense that they remain the heroes of their own story. Creating such a context requires empathy: the capacity to understand and share in the feelings of others. At the personal level, empathy is about sharing emotions. At the strategic level, it is about sharing perspective.”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“Ecosystem construction is the heart of ecosystem disruption. Three principles are of particular help as we consider the essential process of building an ecosystem.* Principle 1: Establish a minimum viable ecosystem Principle 2: Follow a path of staged expansion Principle 3: Deploy ecosystem carryover”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“The markets in Israel and Denmark would have allowed Better Place to reach a sustainable commercial scale within a manageable geographic scope. But as excitement around the company grew and scores of government delegations from around the world came to explore what Better Place might do in their own countries and regions, management attention shifted. Yielding to the temptation of fast, global growth, Better Place launched pilots and spent resources across the world from Australia to the Netherlands, Hawaii to Japan, China to California to Canada.”
― Ron Adner, The Wide Lens: What Successful Innovators See That Others Miss

“Successful platforms are constructed, not simply launched. The absence of a clear MVE and a staged approach to adding partners is a signal that alignment is being presumed rather than planned.”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“Improvements in the competitiveness of the old value proposition (the upward shift in the old value proposition trajectory in figure 4.3) push the point of the new value proposition’s superiority farther and farther away (point C). These shifts can be rooted in improvements in the old technology itself; improvements in the broader ecosystem; or in improvements that arise because of innovations developed to enable the new value proposition itself, and benefit the old value proposition as well.”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“This is the followers’ version of the ego-system trap: acting as though the game is only played between themselves and the leader, rather than positioning broadly with regard to the other players in the ecosystem.”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“Two litmus test questions offer guidance as to whether expansion is within or across ecosystems: 1.   As you expand the value proposition, will your new partners find your leadership claim to be at least as convincing as your current partners find it to be?”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“In short, Kodak won its hard-fought battle to become a digital printing company only to be crushed by digital viewing. This is a different kind of disruption.”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“Innovating within an ecosystem means recognizing that there are multiple elements that need to be aligned. The readiness of a given technology does not offset the bottlenecks created when other pieces are not ready. This means that, beyond managing your own execution, you need to be aware of the emergence challenges that reside elsewhere within your ecosystem.”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“If you are first to the starting line and then waiting for the flag, you have won the wrong race.”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“as of 2019, students at Clemson University could use their SEOS-enabled Android device, iPhone, or Apple Watch to enter their dorm, check out a book from the library, or buy a meal at the cafeteria. Expanding its value proposition, SEOS gave ASSA ABLOY a platform upon which access and payment were now intertwined. Your digital identity gets you in the door—and it also gets you lunch.”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“Kodak collapsed not because it did not succeed in its transformation into a digital printing company, but because digital printing became largely irrelevant with the rise of digital viewing and sharing. Kodak’s value creation was upended not by a rival or a direct substitute, but by shifts elsewhere in its ecosystem. It fell victim to the ecosystem dynamic of value inversion.”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“The value proposition is the articulation of the benefit that the collective effort of the ecosystem will create, and hence sets the direction of the activities and collaborations that follow.”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“The value proposition underlying ASSA ABLOY’s vision of intelligent access is that every person gets exactly the access they need—no more, no less; both physical and temporal. Its vision would no longer be defined by making locks and keys, though this mechanical segment still makes up a healthy 26 percent of global sales. The company’s new value architecture was redefined as creating, managing, monitoring, leveraging, and even erasing—identity.”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“Nadella shows that broad-based ecosystem ambition can be sustained if it is tailored to the coalition: leading in the arenas where others are willing to follow; supporting the leadership of others where your own followership is more productive. The enlightened resolution to the ego-system trap is creating an alignment structure in which everyone can be the hero of their own journey.”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“For enlightened incumbents, ecosystem carryover is the “secret sauce” for creating new market space. For startups, once they are established, ecosystem carryover can be a powerful accelerator of growth and expansion. Carryover is a delicate process, as you work to convince partners to follow your vision into a yet-to-be established ecosystem.”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“What is your process for selecting which elements of your architecture you should enhance and defend, and which you should accept as commoditizing? The more competition feels head-to-head, characterized by intense battles for well-defined market share, the more commoditized is the value being fought over. The greater the variation in value creation—a direct consequence of different architectures—the more potential for coexistence in the market.”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“we will examine the tensions between the execution mindset required to exercise leadership within a mature ecosystem and the alignment mindset required to establish leadership in an emerging ecosystem. Understanding how to manage the fit between these mindsets and your position in the ecosystem cycle matters regardless of whether your purpose is selecting leaders, working under leaders, or developing yourself as a leader.”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“It takes an alignment mindset to establish an ecosystem. However, once it is aligned, the skillset and mindset of alignment become objectively less important. What matters at this point is execution within the boundaries of the ecosystem—the management challenge of getting the trains to run on time, and the opportunity to get the most out of the figurative train lines—extending new services, bolting on adjacent businesses, and doing all this at growing scale with growing efficiency while managing the established relationships within the ecosystem.”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“Spotify had learned its lesson. Deploying a powerful capability in the domain of your allies is a recipe for crisis. Sustaining a coalition requires disciplining your own urges and direction of growth. A corollary, however, is that deploying that same capability in a domain where you do not depend on critical allies can be a powerful growth accelerator. For Spotify, being forced to look beyond music clarified the potential of a new horizon in podcasts—audio shows in the spirit of early radio, covering an enormous variety of topics and themes. Within a year of dropping the upload service in the music arena, Spotify would spend over $1 billion acquiring exclusive content and content aggregators in the podcast arena,”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“The heart of ecosystem strategy is finding a way to align partners into the structural arrangement (i) that you want them in; and (ii) that they are willing to occupy.”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“Their common denominator is not merely success, but rather success that came about by redrawing boundaries and aligning partners in new ways. Each disrupted the structure of an ecosystem, but always through actions consistent with the three principles of ecosystem construction: MVE, staged expansion, and ecosystem carryover. These are the keys to partner alignment, and to transforming ambitious vision into coherent, coordinated, collaborative reality.”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“The success of electric cars depends not just on the components—cars, batteries, charge spots—but in how they are put together to solve the problems of range, resale value, and grid capacity. A narrow focus on commercializing the individual pieces without accounting for how they fit together in the bigger picture is a recipe for failure. Unfortunately for Better Place, poor execution on a brilliant model is a potent recipe for failure as well.”
― Ron Adner, The Wide Lens: What Successful Innovators See That Others Miss

“Three Better Place Lessons 1. In ecosystems, we must monitor the burn rate of partner patience just as carefully as the burn rate of investment capital. 2. A strategy of ecosystem reconfiguration must incorporate within it a strategy for setting ecosystem boundaries. Establishing a Minimum Viable Ecosystem (chapter 8) is a critical element of any such plan. 3. In a world of ecosystems, great execution is no longer sufficient for success, but it remains a necessary condition.”
― Ron Adner, The Wide Lens: What Successful Innovators See That Others Miss

“This is a first view of the advantage of incumbency. Any clever company can come up with a great innovation. But getting conservative actors to adjust their business activity to bring the value to market on a commercial basis can often be the bigger challenge (and the construction industry is a poster child of conservatism when it comes to innovation). By leveraging partners and relationships from the world of mechanical locks into the world of intelligent access, ASSA ABLOY was able to establish the foothold it needed for its subsequent, bigger steps”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“Like Amazon porting over Prime users to its Alexa platform early on and then expanding beyond the home, this is not merely cross-selling to a fixed population. This is about changing the alignment structures and terms of collaboration with partners in a way that just showing up with money and a proven brand would never allow.”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“they should be at least as fearful of being too early and exhausting their resources before the revolution actually begins.”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“The difference becomes clear when we consider the role of early customers: The job of the early customer in an MVP is to teach you about the market before you launch a product. The job of the early customer in an MVE is to provide you with sufficient evidence to attract a partner, who will then attract the next partner.”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World