Opinion
What’s Your Best Innovation Bet?
— June 19, 2017

By Melissa Schilling
Technology—the way inputs are transformed into outputs, or the way products and services are delivered to customers—evolves in every market.
By Melissa Schilling
One of my favorite examples comes from the consumer electronics and recording industries, which competed on the basis of audio fidelity for decades. By the mid-1990s, both industries were eager to introduce a next-generation audio format. In 1996 Toshiba, Hitachi, Time Warner, and others formed a consortium to back a new technology, called DVD-Audio, that offered superior fidelity and surround sound. They hoped to do an end run around Sony and Philips, which owned the compact disc standard and extracted a licensing fee for every CD and player sold.
Sony and Philips, however, were not going to go down without a fight. They counterattacked with a new format they had jointly developed, Super Audio CD. Those in the music industry gave a collective groan; manufacturers, distributors, and consumers all stood to lose big if they bet on the wrong format. Nonetheless, Sony launched the first Super Audio players in late 1999; DVD-Audio players hit the market in mid-2000. A costly format war seemed inevitable.
Read full article as published by Harvard Business Review.
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Melissa Schilling is a Professor of Management and Organizations.