Strategy, Value Innovation, and the Knowledge Economy

作者：W. Chan Kim, Renée Mauborgne · 发表于：Sloan management review · 年份：1999 · 研究领域：Business Strategy and Innovation、Intellectual Capital and Performance Analysis、Innovation and Knowledge Management

Managers typically assess what competitors do and strive to do it better. Using this approach, companies expend tremendous effort and achieve only incremental improvement ? imitation, not innovation. By focusing on the competition, companies tend to be reactive, and their understanding of emerging mass markets and changing customer demands becomes hazy. During the past decade, Kim and Mauborgne have studied companies of sustained high growth and profits. All pursue a strategy, value innovation, that renders the competition irrelevant by offering new and superior buyer value in existing markets or by enabling the creation of new markets through quantum leaps in buyer value. Value innovation places equal emphasis on value and innovation, since innovation without value can be too strategic or wild, too technology-driven or futuristic. Hence, value innovation is not the same as value creation. Although value creation on an incremental scale creates some value, it is not sufficient for high performance. To value innovate, managers must ask two questions: Is the firm offering customers radically superior value? and Is the firm's price level accessible to the mass of buyers in the target market? A consequence of market insight gained from creative strategic thinking, value innovation focuses on redefining problems to shift the performance criteria that matter to customers. Kim and Mauborgne ask five key questions contrasting conventional competition-based logic with that of val...