Innovation That Works with Professor Jagdish Sheth

Most great ideas never become commercial successes — and the odds of turning an invention into a profitable business are statistically worse than winning the lottery. This course reframes the innovation challenge with a counterintuitive insight: the biggest barriers to innovation are not cultural or psychological, but structural. Learners will explore the five key internal barriers that prevent inventions from reaching the marketplace — super specialization, inflexible operations, insufficient resources, regulatory constraints, and limited market access — and discover proven strategies to overcome each one. Through real-world case studies from IBM, Motorola, Texas Instruments, and others, learners will understand why even well-funded, well-intentioned companies fail to commercialize their best ideas, and what it takes to break through the structural resistance that stands between innovation and market success.

Most theories about industry evolution focus on disruption and decline — but industries rarely die. They transform. This course offers a broader, more nuanced framework for understanding how industries are born, how they grow, and how they revitalize through the constant tension between efficiency and growth. Learners will explore why industries are more often created by creative duplication and government policy than by breakthrough invention, and how mature industries organize themselves into a predictable structure of volume-driven generalists and margin-driven specialists — captured in the powerful Rule of Three framework. Through examples spanning ride-sharing, cell phones, retail, and beyond, this course gives learners the tools to read industry structure, anticipate competitive dynamics, and identify opportunities for growth and revitalization at any stage of an industry's life cycle.

Innovation obsession is sweeping the world — but innovation alone is not enough. To drive real growth, companies must learn to innovate affordably. This course introduces four proven strategies for developing low-cost innovations that can scale globally: reverse innovation, plug-and-play modularization, proactive disruption, and targeting base-of-the-pyramid markets. Learners will explore how the economics of the digital age, where marginal cost approaches zero, fundamentally change the innovation calculus, and why emerging markets like China, India, and Africa are now the proving grounds for the world's most transformative products. Through examples ranging from GE's portable EKG machines to IKEA's modular furniture to the Tata Nano car, this course demonstrates that affordability is not a constraint on innovation — it is its most powerful driver.

Even when a new product reaches the market, it often fails — and sometimes the most technically superior innovations fall flat while inferior alternatives succeed. This course draws on decades of research into innovation resistance to explain why markets reject new ideas. Learners will examine six root causes of market failure — three rational (poor performance, lack of relative value, and usage incompatibility) and three emotional (perceived risk, tradition and orthodoxy, and negative image). Through cases including the Iridium satellite phone, Betamax, the Ford Mustang, and Kevlar, learners will discover that most major successes happen by accident, and most failures stem from forces companies can identify and address. The course equips learners with a practical framework for diagnosing whether an innovation needs R&D intervention, marketing intervention, or both.

The digital age has not just changed what we produce — it has fundamentally disrupted the economic rules that govern how industries compete, scale, and survive. This course examines how the economics of the digital era are radically different from those of the industrial age, and what that shift means for businesses today. Learners will explore why vertical integration — the dominant industrial-age strategy — becomes a liability in the digital world, and how speed and volume together, rather than volume alone, determine market leadership. Through the stories of IBM, Motorola, DirecTV, and Texas Instruments, learners will understand how companies that embraced digital economics transformed themselves, while those that didn't lost their competitive edge. This course provides a foundational framework for navigating the economic forces reshaping every industry in the digital age.