Given the importance of competitive life cycles to understand any digital transformation, I'd like to provide you with some tools, some ways of mapping competitive life cycles for your business. In my book, The Strategist Toolkit provided the following little diagram as a way to think through where you're positioned on various products within the competitive life cycle rather than represented as a serious of graphs, here we represented as a circle. Recognizing the fact that often we see renewal and the process begin again as new technologies and disruptions enter the marketplace. Here we see our three phases, emergent phase, growth phase, mature phase, and we see our transition points of a kneeling shakeout and disruption. And overall, we're really interested in how quickly does this process take? How speedy is this competitive life cycle for our particular industry? So let's give an example, here we have Apple in particular apple circuit in 2011. In 2011 they just recently offered the iPad one could argue that the iPad was still in an emergent phase. Maybe we're still trying to figure out exactly what that form factor is going to look like. The iPhone had been offered a few years before that was more on the growth phase, we really now coalesced on what a smartphone looked like, we were in the high growth phase part of the market. We had the iPod which was entering a more mature phase at this point here shake out it occurred, dominant player in the iPod, but now growth was starting to decline and we were entering that mature phase of competition. And even more mature, we have the Mac product, one that have been around for decades and arguably towards the end of its life cycle as a form factor. Once again, we can now map out all four of these businesses simultaneously, get a sense of where they are. Some questions we want to ask, first, how long are each of these phases? Do we expect the mature phase to be decades long, or is this this going to be a matter of a few years? How long is that emergent phases? Is the iPad going to be something that will be emerging for a few years, or will be a relatively quick. And again, we can work through each of these different phases. Overall, we might ask is this a slowly evolving industry, one that might be relatively stable for decades, or is this maybe on the other extreme what we might refer to as a hyper dynamic industry where every 18 months or so things are new, things are coming to market and transforming the marketplace. We also want to think about the severity of each of these transitions. Are the disruptions more radical in nature, or more incremental in nature? When we think about the annealing process here, do we imagine one single dominant design or will there potentially multiple competing designs that can still co exist within the marketplace. When we think of shake out, is this a winner take all market. Is this one of these industries again where we're just going to see one single winner or is this something that's going to be maybe a duopoly or oligopoly. A small number of competitors? Is this rather going to be a contested market where we have lots of different competitors working to try to be dominant within the marketplace? And overall, we want to think through these questions about are their first mover advantages this timely matter here, can we wait and be patient and have a second mover opportunity? So again, as we think through this competitive life cycle, it allows us to create a portfolio of understanding of the various products in the market. One could take Apple in 2011, an advantage it advance it to 2017. What would we see? Well, most of these technologies now would be moving into the mature phase, well that could mean that new disruptions could be coming around the bend that Apple needs to be aware of and maybe investing in the next technology that will disrupt the marketplace
