How Industries Evolve:Principles for Achieving and Sustaining Superior Performance

There are specific rules that govern how change can successfully occur in a given industry. Companies whose growth strategies follow the rules of their industry succeed; those who break the rules fail. This book shows how to align strategy with the principles of industry change to achieve sustainable growth.

Why do many companies fail to generate substantial returns on their investments in innovation? In our summary of How Industries Evolve, Anita McGahan argues that strategy fails when a company breaks the rules of change in its industry.

McGahan is the Everett V. Lord Distinguished Faculty Scholar and Professor of Strategy and Policy at the Boston University School of Management. She is also Senior Institute Associate at Harvard's Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness.

She explains that, while industries sometimes seem to change overnight, they actually evolve in predictable stages across decades. Executives can learn to identify the implications of change far in advance, and align their strategies in a way that vastly improves their chances for superior performance.

Based on a 10-year statistical research study involving more than 700 industries, How Industries Evolve reveals how you can tell whether an industry‘s core activities or assets are being threatened; helps you to see the implications of structural change before your competitors do; and decide which forms of innovation will work within your industry‘s context - and which ones won‘t work.