This fascinating and chilling account of technological innovation belongs on the recommended lists of technology managers and staff alike. Utterback marshals compelling case histories that provide the objective foundations for more popular accounts of technology transformation, such as Moore’s Crossing the chasm [1]. We gain insight into why it is so crowded at the bottom.

There is an abundance of reasons why firms that represent established technology are the least likely to perceive the threat represented by radical innovation. The technological discontinuity is not going to come from established competitors. All the electric typewriter manufacturers were affected by the word processor. But how are we to recognize the radical innovation?

The key to Utterback’s argument is the idea of a “dominant design” of a technology. It forms the center of a network of system features; user habits; and collateral assets such as brand image, market channel, and customer switching costs. By definition, the dominant design wins the market. It is the pattern to which both competitors and incremental innovators must adhere to if they are aiming at a significant following in the current market. It is what is overthrown by radical innovation.

Each chapter uses a case history to illuminate an aspect of the dynamics of innovation. Thomas Edison came late to the race to produce a commercial electric lamp. He succeeded through ingenuity and systematic thinking. From the start, he planned for scalability, aiming to deliver electricity through the illuminating gas conduits that formed his major competitors’ delivery system. He also laid down a network of patents as he worked and legally pursued those who tried to steal his mechanisms. Utterback’s other examples include the qwerty typewriter keyboard, the IBM-compatible PC, the Cray computer, the Intel-based massively parallel computer, the ballpoint pen, the float process of making plate glass, celluloid (Kodak) film, the incandescent light bulb, and the Intel x86 chip.

A fascinating account of cutting natural ice from the lakes of New England in the mid-1800s should have a sobering effect on complacent technology managers. Here radical innovation meant refrigeration. The ice industry, which efficiently transported harvested ice to as distant a market as India, was unable to envision refrigeration. Industry outsiders were the ones who thought of it. Why? According to Utterback, industry insiders have a heavy investment, both technological and emotional, in the existing system of infrastructure, distribution, and production. “From a practical point of view,” he notes, “their managerial attention is encumbered by the system they have--just maintaining and marginally improving their existing systems is a full-time occupation.” They are ripe for the process that Schumpeter described as “creative destruction”[2].

Innovation is shown to resemble a game of chutes and ladders. A new technology represents a ladder for getting off the slope of incremental progress and jumping to another level. The chute is the path by which managers dedicated to the customers of the about-to-be obsolete technology follow it into oblivion and obscurity. This is a grim prospect and, according to Utterback’s cases, occurs about 70 percent of the time. How do the lucky few reinvent themselves?

Utterback appreciates the possibility, and provides the examples of Hewlett-Packard and Motorola. But the examples of what does not work are legion. Discounted cashflow will rarely (if ever) fund risky, radically innovative projects. Digital’s simultaneous pursuit of VAX and MIPS chips, with one foot on each side of the chasm, represents a type of compromise that helped land Digital at the bottom. Assigning a new technology initiative to an establishment department is like asking Goliath to be little David’s mentor. If a state-of-the-art lab is established, then you may end up with Xerox PARC, which invented modern computing without benefiting Xerox--or you may end up with Edison’s Menlo Park workshop or Bell Laboratories. This approach, though risky, is a gamble that may pay off. A diversified portfolio of R&D projects is part of the equation. Equally important are commitment, patience, and persistence on the part of top management. The enterprise-wide nurturing of core competencies in marketing and distribution, along with product design and implementation, are critical to firm-wide renewal. Reading this text will help technology managers understand how to cross the chasm of technological discontinuity and innovation, instead of ending up at the bottom of it.