The Innovation Marathon offers a guidance from the experience of successful firms on how to achieve continuing innovation, intense employee commitment, simultaneous high creativity and tight control, and flexible responses to rapid change.

Acknowledgements vi 1 Electronics Competition: A New Game 1 2 Old Ways, New Days 30 3 Patterns of Stability and Change 55 4 Does Strategy Exist? Does it Work? 87 5 The Roots of Innovation 131 6 Managing Choices, Maintaining Innovation 165 7 The Paradox of Formal Systems and Adaptable Strategies 205 8 Organizing for Innovation 252 9 The Innovation Cycle 295 10 The Manufacturing End-Game: Sustaining Innovation 337 11 Strong Culture and its Consequences 367 12 Living in Turbulent Times 403 Appendix 430 Bibliography 446 Glossary 459 Index 462

US microelectronics firms face one of the most intensely competitive business environments in the world. Like a host of other industries, its stakes are the rich US domestic market and a burgeoning global market as well. Foreign firms often come to the fray with government subsidies and tariff barriers, while the US competitors typically must go it alone amidst high wages, high capital costs, price pressures and torrid technological change. But the electronics environment isn't unique; it is only the leading edge of competitive circumstances becoming widely visible on all sides. In automobiles, textiles, steel and other basics, as well as newer service businesses, intense global competition from increasingly skilled rivals is a fact of life. In such markets, success lies in repeated, successful innovation coupled with effective business control. The Innovation Marathon explodes several myths: This book offers a guidance from the experience of successful firms on how to achieve continuing innovation, intense employee commitment, simultaneous high creativity and tight control, and flexible responses to rapid change.