The Search for Survival

Ideal for business students, business managers, and corporate senior executives, this book distills the lessons learned from the disasters that have befallen companies that were unable to cope with disruptive technologies.

In recent decades, technology has changed rapidly to the point that it can very quickly affect a seemingly impregnable company or industry. Unexpected technological developments enable innovators to offer new products and services that threaten incumbents. In order to survive, existing firms must be able to see a disruption on the horizon and figure out how to respond.

The Search for Survival: Lessons from Disruptive Technologies examines organizations that failed to develop a strategy for coping with a technological disruption and have suffered greatly or even gone out of business. The first chapter presents a model of how firms can respond to and hopefully survive a disruptive technology. Each following chapter focuses on firms that have failed to survive or whose future is in doubt, accompanied by an extensive, detailed discussion of the lessons learned from each company or field's failings, covering examples from industries such as recorded music, book publishing, video, newspaper, and higher education.