Chakravorti Bhaskar
Monitor Group, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
Harv Bus Rev. 2004 Mar;82(3):58-67, 126.
It's tough to get consumers to adopt innovations--and it's getting tougher all the time. That's because more and more markets are taking on the characteristics of networks. The interconnections among today's companies are so plentiful that often a new product's adoption by one player depends on its systematic adoption by other players. Consider the disparate companies involved with the popularization of digital photography: software vendors, camera manufacturers, broadband communications companies, printer manufacturers, and so on. By contrast, Kodak was pretty much the sole player involved with popularizing film photography. The traditional levers executives use to launch products--such as targeting unique customer segments or developing compelling value propositions--don't work as well in this new environment. Instead, innovators must orchestrate a change of behaviors across the market, unraveling the status quo so that a large number of players adopt their offerings and believe they are better off for having done so. In this article, Monitor Group's Bhaskar Chakravorti outlines a four-part framework for doing just that. The innovator must reason back from a target endgame, implementing only those strategies that maximize its chances of getting to its goal. It must complement power players, positioning its innovation as an enhancement to their products or services. The innovator must offer coordinated switching incentives to three core groups: the players that add to the innovation's benefits, the players that act as channels to adopters, and the adopters themselves. And it must preserve flexibility in case its initial strategy fails. Chakravorti uses Adobe's introduction of its Acrobat software as an example of an innovator that took into account other players in the network--and succeeded because of it.
让消费者接受创新并非易事，而且这一难度还在与日俱增。这是因为越来越多的市场呈现出网络的特性。如今公司之间的联系极为繁多，以至于一家公司对新产品的采用往往取决于其他公司对该产品的系统性采用。以参与数字摄影普及的不同公司为例：软件供应商、相机制造商、宽带通信公司、打印机制造商等等。相比之下，柯达几乎是推动胶片摄影普及的唯一参与者。企业高管用于推出产品的传统手段，比如瞄准独特的客户群体或提出有吸引力的价值主张，在这种新环境下效果不佳。相反，创新者必须精心策划整个市场行为的改变，打破现状，以便大量参与者采用他们的产品，并认为这样做能让自己受益更多。在本文中，摩立特集团的巴斯卡尔·查克拉沃蒂概述了一个分为四个部分的框架来实现这一目标。创新者必须从目标最终结果出发进行逆向推理，只实施那些能最大程度增加实现目标几率的策略。它必须与有影响力的参与者互补，将其创新定位为对他们产品或服务的增强。创新者必须向三个核心群体提供协调一致的转换激励：那些能增加创新效益的参与者、那些充当采用者渠道的参与者以及采用者自身。而且如果其初始策略失败，它必须保持灵活性。查克拉沃蒂以奥多比公司推出Acrobat软件为例，说明创新者如何考虑到网络中的其他参与者，并因此取得成功。
