Synopses & Reviews
"This book really should be read by everyone in business who is concerned about how their businesses will emigrate to cyberspace". -- Joe Pine, Founder, Strategic Horizons LLP, and author of Mass Customization
Designed to become one of the most influential business books of the year, "Unleashing the Killer APP" is a priceless blueprint for how to launch highly successful new products. No high-flying entrepreneur or ambitious corporate executive can afford to pass up the opportunity to get the real inside story on how to identify, nurture, and bring to market the new products that will make their owners hugely successful.
How will they do it? Strategists Larry Downes and Chunka Mui argue that managers must abandon their most cherished planning and control processes. Control and consistency are replaced with chaos and creativity, and old strategies are replaced with digital strategies. "Unleashing the Killer APP" demonstrates how managers are rewriting the rules of business to face this digital ultimatum, upending management science as we know it. This is not your father's business book.
Digital strategy is more than a vision statement. Done right, it becomes the operating model for the business itself. Here are the tools, the techniques, and the proof that's needed to incubate, develop -- and release -- the killer app that lies within your organization.
Synopsis
When technologies, products, and services converge in radical, creative new ways, a "killer app" can emerge - a new application so powerful that it transforms industries, redefines markets, and annihilates the competition. The compass, the steam engine, the cotton gin, and the Model T were all killer apps that sent shock waves through the social, political, and economic systems of their time. Today's killer apps spring from the digital realm: the personal computer, e-mail, and the World Wide Web have profoundly influenced and even altered society far beyond their intended use. Tempted by the promise of such devastating power, companies large and small, from vast multinationals to lean entrepreneurial start-ups, are remaking themselves into organizations that nurture killer apps rather than succumb to them. With Unleashing the Killer App, Downes and Mui offer a progressive guide to transforming your company into a place where killer apps are born. Drawing from their experience and research with leading global businesses, the authors identify the twelve fundamental design principles for building killer apps; illustrate these principles with classic stories from history and examples from a wide range of industries that have successfully developed killer apps; examine the economic consequences of the diminishing transaction costs in cyberspace; and describe how to integrate digital strategy into an organization's planning process to create new markets, form new customer relationships, and change the product line.