If you defer investing your time and energy until you see that you need to, chances are it will already be too late.

People still cling to this belief that innovation is just random and unpredictable. But if you look closely, there are some real patterns. The companies that recognize and take advantage of those patterns have the real opportunity to create competitive advantage.

Another thing I've observed is how critical the role of the CEO is when a technology truly is disruptive. In looking back on companies that have successfully launched independent disruptive business units, the CEO always had a foot in both camps. Never have they succeeded when they spin something off in order to get it off the CEO's agenda. The CEOs that did this had extraordinary personal self-confidence, and almost always they were the founders of the companies.

When product performance outstrips the ability of customers to use that performance in an industry, the competitive game changes. Under those circumstances you have to decouple components businesses from assembly businesses.

Almost always great new ideas don't emerge from within a single person or function, but at the intersection of functions or people that have never met before.

Core competence, as it is used by many managers, is a dangerously inward-looking notion. Competitiveness is far more about doing what customers value than doing what you think you're good at.

In general, the questions that are on our mind are the same questions that have been driving our work over the past decade. How do we bring order to this messy, unpredictable world of innovation? How can we dramatically improve the chances of creating a successful new-growth business? How can we do this again and again? More specifically, it has become very clear that the fundamental paradigms of market segmentation and branding are badly broken - and we're working on developing more useful theories for these dimensions of innovation.