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Describes an innovating start-up company with a disruptive technology to the large, expensive echocardiography machines that leading cardiologists use to create images of heart functions for diagnostic purposes. Ecton's machine is small, cheap, portable, and can't create images as clear as those that large, expensive instruments can make. The entrepreneur is searching for a market for his product, and wonders whether he should sell out or try to build a successful commercial organization.

Describes Dupont's efforts to build commercial markets for its miracle fiber, Kevlar. Initially, it sought to create a market for Kevlar tire cord, primarily because its existing tire cord business was languishing. This market never developed, even after Dupont spent several hundred million dollars. A rewritten version of an earlier case.

Becton Dickinson's Vacutainer business was largely based in the United States, but in 1980 management determined to grow the business aggressively first in Europe and then Japan. These areas demanded new products that were tailored to local markets. Despite the change in strategy, the resource allocation process continued to allocate development resources to U.S.-targeted products.

Companies find it difficult to change strategy for many reasons, but one stands out: Strategic thinking is not a core managerial competence at most companies. Managers are unable to develop competence in strategic thinking because they do it so rarely. Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen helps managers develop a creative strategy and a proficiency in strategic decision making. This article presents a three-stage method executives can use to conceive and implement a creative and coherent strategy themselves. The three-step process forces managers to dig deep in order to understand the forces affecting their business. This method is a useful tool for managers because it helps them link strategic thinking with operational planning: two processes that are often separate but are more effective when connected.

Describes the efforts of the president of Booz.Allen, a major consulting firm, to understand and improve the way that products, services, and processes are developed and deployed throughout the firm. Proactive management of these processes proves very difficult because of the firm's decentralized decision structure and the firm's cultural predisposition to listen to its existing customers.

Unilever, one of the world's largest food product manufacturers, has achieved impressive growth in Europe, primarily by acquiring local food companies. Initially Unilever allowed each acquired company to manage its own product development in a way that was tailored to local tastes and competition. This case describes the struggles that European managers confronted in trying to establish stronger central direction over Pan-European product development, branding, and marketing.

Illustrates how a new management team at Medtronic's Cardiac Pacemaker business reversed a steep decline in market share by adopting certain management principles for new product development: clarifying strategy, aggregating project planning, accommodating the number of projects to match development capacity, and establishing a platform/derivative product architecture, and others. This case is useful in both MBA courses and executive programs.

Spreadsheet supplement for case 698-004.

Hospital Equipment Corp. is a very successful maker of hospital beds. Due to outstanding performance in new product development, it grew to dominate its primary market and is searching for other opportunities to grow through new product development. It discovers that its internal system for identifying new, high-growth markets actually screens out some exciting growth possibilities.

Describes the efforts of a manufacturer of scientific instruments to implement new methods of managing new product development, which its executives had learned in a Harvard Business School seminar. The executives left the seminar excited to implement a new way of working, but, through a series of seemingly logical steps, got little accomplished.

Supplements the (A) case.

Studio Realty created an "electronic open house" technology, by which home buyers sitting in a comfortable setting, could tour a home, viewing its rooms, its exterior, and surroundings, by clicking on digital images. Studio Realty attempted to sell or license its system to realtors, but found that none were interested. Ultimately, its owners had to establish their own real estate agency in order to create demand for the technology. The case closes with the question of whether homes can be sold with this technology over the Internet.

Focuses on the difficulty established companies face when confronted with disruptive technological innovations. The power that their prior asset investments, their cost structures, and their customers have in constraining their investment and innovation decisions are clearly illustrated. Rewritten version of an earlier case.

Summarizes Eli Lilly's history of innovation in its business, describing how the dimensions along which innovations have been made in the industry have changed. Lilly's innovation strategy has been to pursue ever higher performance products, while others in the industry have pursued more convenient products. At the time of the case, Lilly is contemplating offering services, not just products, to diabetic patients.

Materials Technology Corp. (MTC), a high-tech materials company, is struggling in its development portfolio and to achieve a better record of delivering new products on time.

Nypro is the world's leading injection molder of precision plastic parts, operating a global network of 21 plants. Nypro's strategy is for each plant to offer identical capabilities, because its customers are global companies with worldwide sourcing needs. The case describes the way Nypro manages product and process innovation across the global plant network.

One of the most consistent patterns in business is the failure of leading companies to stay at the top of their industries when technologies or markets change. Why is it that established companies invest aggressively--and successfully--in the technologies necessary to retain their current customers but then fail to make the technological investments that customers of the future will demand? The fundamental reason is that leading companies succumb to one of the most popular, and valuable, management dogmas: they stay close to their customers. To remain at the top of their industries, managers must first be able to spot disruptive technologies. To pursue these technologies, managers must protect them from the processes and incentives that are geared to serving mainstream customers. And the only way to do that is to create organizations that are completely independent of the mainstream business.

Describes the highly successful efforts of a management team to turn around the performance of a $30 million Raychem division that manufactures electronic connectors. The original manufacturing system was a batch operation, with a broad product line, high inventories, and slow throughput time. Describes the process of converting the operation to a low-inventory, just-in-time plant, organized by manufacturing cells. Shows how it was done, and the impact it had on different categories of overhead cost.

Materials Technology Corp. (MTC) is an MIT-based start-up company that identified an initial product market for its advanced materials-processing technology using conventional market research techniques. While pursuing that market--advanced microelectronic components--customers from very different markets such as steelmaking and electricians' hardware approach MTC, offering to pay MTC substantial money to develop and manufacture products for it. This calls into question MTC's initial market and product strategy.

NYPRO, Inc., one of the world's leading manufacturers of plastic injection-molded products, is asked by the Vistakon Division of Johnson & Johnson to manufacture molds that Vistakon will use to produce disposable contact lenses. The required dimensional tolerances for NYPRO's molds are 10 times tighter than it has ever achieved before. The case describes how engineering teams in these two companies attempt to work together to develop a capable process for making molds and lenses.