Fast Second:How Smart Companies Bypass Radical Innovation to Enter and Dominate New Markets

It‘s widely believed that the first entrant in a new market seizes the competitive advantage. But that‘s more myth than reality.

While product or service innovators create markets, countless cases prove that radical innovators generally aren‘t the ones thatscale up the markets -- and dominate them.

The reason? It takes one set of skills and attitudes to create a radically new market. But it takes an entirely different set to consolidate a market.

In our summary of Fast Second, internationally acclaimed strategy experts Constantinos Markides and Paul Geroski offer a radical new innovation model for companies that aspire to create radically new markets. They argue that most established companies should let start-up firms create new products, and concentrate their efforts on consolidating the market for the new offering.

In other words, their goal should be to gain a fast second position -- and to seize market leadership from the innovators who created it. Examples of successful fast-second companies include Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, Amazon, Canon, JVS, and Heinz.

In this summary, we will explore how radical innovation creates new-to-the-world markets, and how established firms can scale them up to mass markets and make big profits by using the fast-second strategy.