This book concerns industry creation as knowledge creation. The authors argue that a new class of global, knowledge-driven manufacturing industries has emerged in which learning, continuity, and speed define competition. In these new industries, access to knowledge creation processes matters more than ownership of physical assets. Location matters only insofar as it confers learning advantages and market access. Companies need strategies that can mobilize their organizations' country-specific strengths and freely leverage them in open, global learning partnerships with allies, suppliers, and customers. Managing New Industry Creation distills principles that managers can use to seize leadership for their companies as these new industries emerge.
The authors draw their insights from firsthand discussions with over 160 managers and scientists who helped found the high-information-content flat panel display (FPD) industry. In the early 1990s, large-format FPDs exploded into public knowledge as a critical enabling technology for notebook computers. In the future, FPDs will increasingly function as the face by which users interact with technology products. The book recounts the business decisions that propelled the industry from humble beginnings to empower a globally mobile workforce and eventually build wall-hanging, high definition televisions that every household can afford.
The FPD industry was the first new manufacturing industry to fully emerge in a global economy defined more by trade in knowledge than in physical products. Although FPDs were commercialized in Japan, the joint efforts of an international community of companies made high-volume production of large displays viable. Companies from outside of Japan—including IBM, Applied Materials, and Corning—achieved key positions by challenging U.S.-centered preconceptions of innovation, new business creation, and management process, giving unprecedented global authority and responsibility to their Japanese affiliates. Their success established new rules for competing in the knowledge-driven, global manufacturing industries of the future, first described here for managers, R&D scientists, academics, and students of corporate strategy.
About the authors
Tom Murtha and Stefanie Ann Lenway are Associate Professor and Professor of Strategic Management and Organization at the Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota. Jeffrey A. Hart is Professor of Political Science at Indiana University.
"Finally, a study that offers critical new insights into the complex issue of the evolution of global high-tech industries. This scholarly and painstakingly researched study of the flat panel display industry breaks new ground and represents a clear departure from traditional economic analysis. The authors have developed a fundamentally new and managerially relevant perspective by combining analysis of knowledge creation and industry evolution—people, cross-national teams, investments, and public policy—and by demystifying the glue that binds the apparently distinct roles played by firms and countries; a required reading for those who are concerned about innovation and competition in global industries."
—C.K. Prahalad, chairman, PRAJA, Inc., Harvey C. Fruehauf Professor
of Business Administration, University of Michigan Business School,
and coauthor, Competing for the Future
"Five years of intensive research and conscientious interaction with the display community have produced the only detailed, readable history of the flat panel display industry from early research in the 1960s to the turbulent, high-volume present. Some of the authors' conclusions will be controversial, but noncontroversial conclusions are a waste of time. This book is certainly not a waste of time—it is essential reading for everyone in the display industry and for anyone with a stake in global business management."
—Ken Werner, president, Nutmeg Consultants and editor, Information Display
"This book is a fascinating analysis of the emergence of the first "born global" industry, flat panel displays. It highlights the limits of both conventional business strategy thinking and traditional public policy making in helping us understand the emergence and development of global industries, and points to the dynamics of new global knowledge alliances that underpin the creation of new industries."
—Yves L. Doz, Timken Professor of Global Technology and Innovation, dean, Executive Education, INSEAD, and coauthor of Alliance Advantage
"In New Industry Creation, Murtha, Lenway, and Hart closely examine the birth process of a single high-tech industry. In this fascinating account, they draw valuable lessons about knowledge transfer across geographical boundaries, successful and unsuccessful interplay between research, product development, and manufacturing, and the role of management and governments. There is much here that applies to other industries, and we are reminded again that while sound strategies are important, in the end, details of execution matter."
—Frank Mayadas, program director, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
"This book is the definitive work on the emergence of the flat panel display industry. During the critical growth years, the authors conducted numerous in-depth interviews with the major players around the world. The result is a comprehensive picture of the real factors that determined the eventual winners, as well as valuable insights that apply to today's fast-moving, knowledge-based industries."
—Steven W. Depp, director, Subsystem Technologies and Applications Laboratory, IBM (retired)
"This book is a rich and valuable contribution. It explodes many old myths and stereotypes about technology development in an increasingly internationalized business environment. This is must reading for academics, policymakers, and thoughtful business executives in the United States and around the world interested in technology development and management, organizational behavior, international learning, and knowledge creation."
—Martin Kenney, professor, Human and Community Development, University of California, Davis, editor, Understanding Silicon Valley, and coauthor, The Breakthrough Illusion
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