“Take this quick test: Which firm is the innovator that brought us online bookselling in the 1990s? If your answer is Amazon.com, you are wrong. The idea for online bookselling—and the first online bookstore—came from Charles Stack, an Ohio-based bookseller, in 1991. Computer Literacy bookstore, a successful retail chain, also registered an Internet domain name in 1991. Amazon did not enter this market until 1995.”
It’s a sobering anecdote and a provocative introduction to Fast Second, which was short-listed for the Financial Times’ best business book of 2005. (Thomas L. Friedman’s The World is Flat took the prize.) Research-backed yet accessible, Fast Second looks at the structural characteristics of newly formed markets as well as the managerial skills needed to compete in these new markets.
As we know, first movers often struggle to scale up. A second mover from the me-too school of business, for instance, might watch another company launch an innovative product before rushing in to compete on price. But a fast-second mover knows the importance of timing in terms of understanding when a market is ready to accept a dominant design. “Fast-second movers do not simply wait until the dominant design emerges—they actively take part in creating it,” the authors write.
Individual chapters study how radical innovations originate, new technologies turn into new markets, and organizations deal with the evolving characteristics of competition.
Markides, who earned both his MBA and doctorate from Harvard Business School, is a chaired professor of strategic leadership at the London Business School. The late Paul Geroski taught economics at the London Business School and was chairman of the Competition Commission in the United Kingdom.