The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth (Creating and Sustainability Successful Growth)

by Clayton

For example, electronic cash registers were a radical but sustaining innovation relative to electromechanical cash registers, whose market was dominated by National Cash Register (NCR). NCR totally missed the advent of the new technology in the 1970s—so badly, in fact, that NCR’s product sales literally went to zero. Electronic registers were so superior that there was no reason to buy an electromechanical product except as an antique. Yet NCR survived on service revenues for over a year, and when it finally introduced its own electronic cash register, its extensive sales organization quickly captured the same share of the market as the company had enjoyed in the electromechanical realm.10 The attempts that IBM and Kodak made in the 1970s and 1980s to beat Xerox in the high-speed photocopier business are another example. These companies were far bigger, and yet they failed to outmuscle Xerox in a sustaining-technology competition. The firm that beat Xerox was Canon—and that victory started with a disruptive tabletop copier strategy.