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The pivotal role played by Intel in the development of the semiconductor industry, from the company's founding in 1968 and focus on semiconductor memory products (SRAM and DRAM), through various innovations in microprocessor technology, and leading to the introduction of the 286, 386, and 486 microprocessors is described in this case. Intel's internal ecology of strategy-making-its strategic leadership culture and style of decision making-is described at several key moments in the company's history when strategic decisions related to the entry and exit of several business lines internally competing for resources profoundly influenced the company, and the marketplace. This case draws upon cases and research papers concerning strategy-making at Intel Corporation written between 1989 and 1994.

More than a decade after the high-profile failures of several early online grocers, grocery remains the largest single U.S. retail category and one of the few that has not yet migrated online. Amazon began testing its grocery-delivery service, AmazonFresh, in Seattle, in 2007; five years later, the company has made significant progress. The case traces the evolution of AmazonFresh's business model and describes the operating capabilities necessary to compete with brick-and-mortar supermarkets like Wal-Mart and Safeway and with new digital grocery startups. Now Amazon needs to decide on AmazonFresh's next step. Should the company continue refining its business model in Seattle or expand to another city? What factors should it take into account when planning its next move?

Sixty months after the 2008 recession ended, the economy was still sputtering, producing disappointing growth and job numbers. Corporations seemed stuck: Despite low interest rates, they were sitting on massive piles of cash and failing to invest in new initiatives. In this article, a leading innovation expert and his HBS colleague explore the reasons for this sluggishness. The crux of the problem, they say, is that investments in different types of innovation have different effects on growth but are all evaluated using the same (flawed) metrics. "Performance-improving innovations," which replace old products with better models, and "efficiency innovations," which lower costs, don't produce many jobs. (Indeed, efficiency innovations eliminate them.) "Market-creating innovations," which transform products so radically they create a new class of consumer, do generate jobs for their originators and for the economy. But the assessment metrics that financial markets--and companies--use always show efficiency and performance-improving innovations to be better opportunities. This is the capitalist's dilemma: Doing the right thing for long-term prosperity is the wrong thing for investors, according to the tools that guide investments. Those tools, however, are based on an unexamined assumption: that capital is scarce, and that performance should be assessed by how efficiently companies use it. The truth is, capital is no longer scarce, and our tools need to catch up to that reality.

Consulting's fundamental business model has not changed in more than 100 years: Very smart outsiders go into organizations for a finite period of time and recommend solutions for the most difficult problems confronting their clients. But at traditional strategy-consulting firms, the share of work that is classic strategy has sharply declined over the past 30 years, from 60% or 70% to only about 20%. What accounts for this trend? Disruption is coming for management consulting, the authors say, as it has recently come for law. For many years the professional services were immune to disruption, for two reasons: opacity and agility. Clients find it very difficult to judge a firm's performance in advance, because they are usually hiring it for specialized knowledge and capability that they themselves lack. Price becomes a proxy for quality. And the top consulting (or law) firms have as their primary assets human capital; they aren't hamstrung by substantial resource allocation decisions, giving them remarkable flexibility. Now incumbent firms are seeing their competitive position eroded by technology, alternative staffing models, and other forces. Market research companies and database providers are enabling the democratization of data. The vast turnover at consultancies means armies of experienced strategists are available for hire by former clients, whose increasing sophistication allows them to allocate work instead of relying on one-stop shops as they did in the past. Drawing on the theory of disruption, the authors offer three scenarios for the future of consulting.

Real strategy-in companies and in our lives-is created through hundreds of everyday decisions. As you live your life from day to day, how can you make sure you're heading in the right direction? The authors argue that the answer lies in taking a close look at where your resources are allocated. In this excerpt from their book, How Will You Measure Your Life? (Harper Business, 2012), they show that If your resources aren't supporting the strategy you've decided upon, you are not implementing that strategy.

In this article Wessel and Christensen, both of Harvard Business School, introduce a way to work out how dangerous a disruption may be to your business. With a deep understanding of the jobs your company really does for customers and a clear take on both the advantages the disrupters have and the barriers they face, you can predict whether, to what extent, and how quickly an approaching disruption might displace your business model. Then you can take steps to maximize your core's strengths in response. The authors offer as an example the disruption of retail grocery stores. Although only about 1% of all groceries in the U.S. are currently bought online, the theory of disruption suggests that e-grocers will speed their delivery times, increase their product selection, and add features we can hardly imagine today in pursuit of new customers and higher profit margins. Nevertheless, of the three main jobs for which customers use retail grocers--stock up on nonperishables, shop for tonight's dinner, and grab an emergency item--only the first is vulnerable right now to the disrupters' extendable core: its ability to maintain radically lower prices as it creeps upmarket in search of more customers. That means traditional grocers need to focus on developing innovations to strengthen their hold on the other two.

Companies spend more than $2 trillion on acquisitions every year, yet the M&A failure rate is between 70% and 90%. Executives can dramatically increase their odds of success, the authors argue, if they understand how to select targets, how much to pay for them, and whether and how to integrate them. The most common reasons for making an acquisition include holding on to a premium position or cutting costs. But to realize those benefits, the acquirer needs to achieve economies of scale by absorbing the target's resources into its operations. CEOs, who are often unrealistic about the performance boost from such acquisitions, must be sure not to pay too much for them. A less-familiar reason for making an acquisition is to fundamentally change a company's growth trajectory. In those deals, the acquirer uses the target's business model as a platform for growth. Because the business models with the most transformative potential are often disruptive, they can be difficult to evaluate, and CEOs often believe that such acquisitions are overpriced. In fact, however, those are the ones that can pay off spectacularly.

Unlike traditional market segmentations that are based on a correlation of product sales or service with the attributes of the purchaser (such as age, gender, income level, and education level), jobs-based segmentation seeks to understand the causal roots of purchase-when a buyer needs to "hire" a product or service to get a "job" done. This note details the thought process and the methodology behind a jobs-based segmentation and provides numerous examples. It highlights three levels in the architecture of a job: 1) What is the fundamental job or problem the customer is facing? This includes political, functional, emotional, and social dimensions; 2) What are the experiences in purchase and use that, if all provided, would sum up to nailing the job perfectly? (The "hiring criteria"); and 3) What do we need to integrate, and how must we knit those things together, so that we can provide these experiences?

Harvard Business School's Christensen teaches aspiring MBAs how to apply management and innovation theories to build stronger companies. But he also believes that these models can help people lead better lives. In this article, he explains how, exploring questions everyone needs to ask: How can I be happy in my career? How can I be sure that my relationship with my family is an enduring source of happiness? And how can I live my life with integrity? The answer to the first question comes from Frederick Herzberg's assertion that the most powerful motivator isn't money; it's the opportunity to learn, grow in responsibilities, contribute, and be recognized. That's why management, if practiced well, can be the noblest of occupations; no others offer as many ways to help people find those opportunities. It isn't about buying, selling, and investing in companies, as many think. The principles of resource allocation can help people attain happiness at home. If not managed masterfully, what emerges from a firm's resource allocation process can be very different from the strategy management intended to follow. That's true in life too: If you're not guided by a clear sense of purpose, you're likely to fritter away your time and energy on obtaining the most tangible, short-term signs of achievement, not what's really important to you. And just as a focus on marginal costs can cause bad corporate decisions, it can lead people astray. The marginal cost of doing something wrong "just this once" always seems alluringly low. You don't see the end result to which that path leads. The key is to define what you stand for and draw the line in a safe place.

Bill Hambrecht faces a dilemma: should he accept a high profile client for his online Dutch auction IPO? Though it would be viewed as a real coup, what would accepting the business mean to WR Hambrecht? Should he seek other high profile clients like this, or should he try to work with those companies on lower profile financing activities like secondary offerings? Or perhaps he should work with companies that are too small to attract the attention of the big investment banks, who really don't like the whole Dutch auction idea. The case offers a very different setting to apply the theory of disruptive innovation, yet one in an industry that might be quite familiar to many students.

"How do I find innovative people for my organization? And how can I become more innovative myself?" These are questions that stump most senior executives, who know that the ability to innovate is the "secret sauce" of business success. Perhaps for this reason most of us stand in awe of the work of visionary entrepreneurs such as Apple's Steve Jobs, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, eBay's Pierre Omidyar, and P&G's A.G. Lafley. How do these individuals come up with groundbreaking new ideas? In this article, Dyer, of Brigham Young University; Gregersen, of Insead; and Christensen, of Harvard Business School, reveal how innovative entrepreneurs differ from typical executives. Their study demonstrates that five "discovery skills" distinguish the most creative executives: Associating helps them discover new directions by making connections among seemingly unrelated questions, problems, or ideas. Questioning allows innovators to break out of the status quo and consider new ideas. Through observing, innovators carefully and consistently look out for small behavioral details - in the activities of customers, suppliers, and other companies - to gain insights about new ways of doing things. In experimenting, they relentlessly try on new experiences and explore the world. And through networking with diverse individuals from an array of backgrounds, they gain radically different perspectives.

On June 23, 2006, Anadarko Petroleum Corporation announced that it was simultaneously acquiring two public companies, Kerr-McGee and Western Gas Resources, in all-cash deals. The total price was about $24 billion, a figure close to Anadarko's market cap at the time. The parallel deal flows and negotiations had been completed in a matter of months. The specific dynamics of this "deal" were extraordinary. Anadarko, Kerr-McGee and Western were all companies with rich and dynamic histories. The combination of resources, processes and people involved in these deals was complex and powerful. The announcement presented a real investor relations challenge for Anadarko. How would Anadarko explain the deals? How would the companies combine to build the most value? What would be divested to pay back the cash? What was the strategy behind these transformative deals? How was this pulled off so quickly and effectively?

After two years of less than stellar performance resulting in sales well below plan, senior management at General Motors (GM) mobile telecommunications service start-up, OnStar, recognized that without a substantial change in their strategy, support for the venture would dwindle. Chet Huber (HBS 1979) faced one of the toughest decisions of his career. He had to decide whether to press GM executives to approve a plan to factory install OnStar hardware on every vehicle it manufactured-a new strategy requiring a dramatic increase in the corporation's commitment to the struggling technology venture. The alternative would be to continue with the current strategy of selling OnStar as an aftermarket product at GM dealerships. GM produced over five million new vehicles a year. Installing OnStar on every vehicle could exponentially increase the subscriber base but would cost hundreds of millions of dollars and lead to an unknown number of changes both within OnStar and at GM factories.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Clayton Christensen is best known for his ideas about how disruptive innovations can transform markets. In this wide-ranging interview, he discusses topics ranging from the downturn's effect on innovation to opportunities to improve the U.S. health care system. Christensen thinks the economic downturn will be good for innovation, because downturns force innovators to adapt their strategies to the market quickly and inexpensively. What's more, he notes that resource constraints stimulate breakthrough thinking. And, despite the recent problems in the financial markets, Christensen believes that, overall, innovation has been beneficial in financial services. He cites historical financial innovations, such as no-load mutual funds and index funds, as examples of the way disruptive innovations in financial services have benefited consumers. However, he also notes that there are markets in which regulation is necessary -and the securities industry is one. Christensen, who is the coauthor of a new book on health care, The Innovator's Prescription, also discussed how disruptive innovation might improve the U.S. health care system. He explains how disruptive innovation helps make goods and services inexpensive and accessible.

Why is it so difficult for established companies to pull off the new growth that business model innovation can bring? Here's why: They don't understand their current business model well enough to know if it would suit a new opportunity or hinder it, and they don't know how to build a new model when they need it. Drawing on their vast knowledge of disruptive innovation and experience in helping established companies capture game-changing opportunities, consultant Johnson, Harvard Business School professor Christensen, and SAP co-CEO Kagermann set out the tools that executives need to do both. Successful companies already operate according to a business model that can be broken down into four elements: a customer value proposition that fulfills an important job for the customer in a better way than competitors' offerings do; a profit formula that lays out how the company makes money delivering the value proposition; and the key resources and key processes needed to deliver that proposition. Game-changing opportunities deliver radically new customer value propositions: They fulfill a job to be done in a dramatically better way (as P&G did with its Swiffer mops), solve a problem that's never been solved before (as Apple did with its iPod and iTunes electronic entertainment delivery system), or serve an entirely unaddressed customer base (as Tata Motors is doing with its Nano-the $2,500 car aimed at Indian families who use scooters to get around). Capitalizing on such opportunities doesn't always require a new business model: P&G, for instance, didn't need a new one to leverage its product innovation strengths to develop the Swiffer. A new model is often needed, however, to leverage a new technology (as in Apple's case); is generally required when the opportunity addresses an entirely new group of customers (as with the Nano); and is surely in order when an established company needs to fend off a successful disruptor (as the Nano's competitors may now need to do).

Most companies aren't half as innovative as their senior executives want them to be (or as their marketing claims suggest they are). What's stifling innovation? There are plenty of usual suspects, but the authors finger three financial tools as key accomplices. Discounted cash flow and net present value, as commonly used, underestimate the real returns and benefits of proceeding with an investment. Most executives compare the cash flows from innovation against the default scenario of doing nothing, assuming - incorrectly - that the present health of the company will persist indefinitely if the investment is not made. In most situations, however, competitors' sustaining and disruptive investments over time result in deterioration of financial performance. Fixed- and sunk-cost conventional wisdom confers an unfair advantage on challengers and shackles incumbent firms that attempt to respond to an attack. Executives in established companies, bemoaning the expense of building new brands and developing new sales and distribution channels, seek instead to leverage their existing brands and structures. Entrants, in contrast, simply create new ones. The problem for the incumbent isn't that the challenger can spend more; it's that the challenger is spared the dilemma of having to choose between full-cost and marginal-cost options. The emphasis on short-term earnings per share as the primary driver of share price, and hence shareholder value creation, acts to restrict investments in innovative long-term growth opportunities. These are not bad tools and concepts in and of themselves, but the way they are used to evaluate investments creates a systematic bias against successful innovation. The authors recommend alternative methods that can help managers innovate with a much more astute eye for future value.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. The way a company views its markets determines what it decides to produce, how it will take those products to market, who it believes its competitors to be, and how large it believes its market opportunities are. Most companies segment along lines defined by the characteristics of their products (category or price) or customers (age, gender, marital status, and income level) since that is the most easily accessible type of data, but product and customer characteristics are poor indicators of customer behavior because that is not how markets are structured from the customer's perspective. Customers simply need to get things done, whether that is fixing their car, staving off boredom, or finding something fun to do with their kids. These situational needs for which customers are looking to "hire" products or services go unnoticed during traditional market research and segmentation. As a result, the true breadth of competition often goes unnoticed too. When companies understand what they are up against in the mind of the customer, they can piece together the real size of the market in which they compete. Using examples from the fast food industry, furniture retailing, the automobile industry, and health care, and citing a wide variety of companies and brands, including FedEx, Starbucks, Google, Blackberry, TurboTax, and OnStar, this article describes the benefits that executives can reap when they segment their markets by job (the risk and cost of innovation is minimized), the methods that those involved in marketing and new product development can use to identify the job-based structure of a market (interviews, surveys, observation, empathic and co-evolution techniques), and how the details of business plans can be made more coherent and focused when innovators understand the job to be done.

Countries, organizations, and individuals around the globe spend aggressively to solve social problems, but these efforts often fail to deliver. Misdirected investment is the primary reason for that failure. Most of the money earmarked for social initiatives goes to organizations that are structured to support specific groups of recipients, often with sophisticated solutions. Such organizations rarely reach the broader populations that could be served by simpler alternatives. There is, however, an effective way to get to those underserved populations. The authors call it "catalytic innovation." Based on Clayton Christensen's disruptive-innovation model, catalytic innovations challenge organizational incumbents by offering simpler, good-enough solutions aimed at underserved groups. Unlike disruptive innovations, though, catalytic innovations are focused on creating social change. Catalytic innovators are defined by five distinct qualities. First, they create social change through scaling and replication. Second, they meet a need that is either overserved (that is, the existing solution is more complex than necessary for many people) or not served at all. Third, the products and services they offer are simpler and cheaper than alternatives, but recipients view them as good enough. Fourth, they bring in resources in ways that initially seem unattractive to incumbents. And fifth, they are often ignored, put down, or even discouraged by existing organizations, which don't see the catalytic innovators' solutions as viable. As the authors show through examples in health care, education, and economic development, both nonprofit and for-profit groups are finding ways to create catalytic innovation that drives social change.

Pitney Bowes, the world's dominant maker of equipment used in generating and handling mail, is facing flattening growth in its core businesses and needs to create new growth products and businesses. Describes how a group of employees use state-of-the-art techniques for understanding customers' needs to conceive and develop a postage meter for small businesses. Also describes the challenges the team faced in forging an appropriate disruptive channel to this market.