Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 18, 2016

In 1960, Harvard professor Theodore Levitt published a landmark paper in Harvard Business Review that urged executives to adapt by asking themselves, “What business are we really in?” ” Other attempts to adapt to Apple’s innovations, such as the Zune mp3 player, didn’t gain traction either.

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Harvard Business Review

APRIL 13, 2017

He noticed they were taking the excess pulp—normally a waste product–and putting it back into a special batch of juice for their personal consumption. Theodore Levitt's classic theory -- in under two minutes. Grovestand wasn’t Hughes’s only innovation. Averages are the enemies of innovators.

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Harvard Business Review

NOVEMBER 18, 2015

Christensen and two co-authors revisit where disruption theory stands today in a new HBR article, “What Is Disruptive Innovation?” As Ted Levitt pointed out 55 years ago, companies develop significant myopia over time, only seeing things that are squarely in the mainstream of their market.

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Harvard Business Review

MAY 19, 2015

Edison’s breakthrough was guided by a fundamental insight: any given product is only as powerful as the system in which it is deployed. This insight resonates with our work on disruption across industries: disruptive innovations create new systems or “value networks” that eventually displace the old ones.

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Strategy Levitt Energy System 8

Harvard Business Review

MAY 6, 2014

Growth alternatives usually involve either launching new products or entering new markets, and these are activities where uncertainty is high. Disruptive innovation practitioners have just such a tool for reliably predicting customers’ behavior. Briefly, the idea is this: Consumers don’t go to the store to buy products.

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Harvard Business Review

MARCH 21, 2014

Decades ago, Harvard professor Theodore Levitt popularized the rationale behind why people buy quarter-inch drill bits: “People don’t want quarter-inch bits. Technology advancements are quickly outpacing traditional use cases, making the design and development of meaningful products harder than ever. They want quarter-inch holes.”

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Harvard Business Review

JUNE 1, 2011

The story has a happy ending, though, at least for readers: Dickens went on to keep writing at an alarmingly productive rate, leaving us with some of the most compelling stories of the nineteenth century.). Maybe it's a good time to dredge up a chestnut from Ted Levitt's classic HBR article, "Marketing Myopia."

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Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 13, 2012

In 1960, the editor of the Harvard Business Review, Theodore Levitt, wrote that the failure of railroads could be explained in part by the myopic view that they were in the railroad business and not the transportation business, which left them vulnerable to competition from cars, trucks, and planes.

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Health Care Levitt Film Chemicals 15

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 15, 2015

A gold-plated product or service. A typical product or service comparison in most industries would show that incumbents usually have the best products in a given market, which reflects their obsession with high-margin customers. ” The concept of a product’s job-to-be-done is not new.

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Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 24, 2013

The “jobs-to-be-done” theory articulates the gap between how producers view and market a product and how customers actually use it. Every time a customer buys a product, they are trying to do a job that brings some value to them – and not necessarily what the product says on the label.

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Marketing B2B Levitt Disruptive Innovation 8

Joseph Lalonde

MARCH 14, 2018

Michael Levitt, CEO of BreakfastLeadership.com. When you’re pouring every spare minute into growing your business, taking a break to visit the gym often feels counter-productive. Setting goals daily has allowed me to feel more in control of my life while boosting my productivity. Photo by Lua Valentia. Brian Dodd.

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Harvard Business Review

MAY 11, 2017

That’s because most companies view their competition as another brand, product, or service. Sure, someone in your company needs to understand the marketplace: who your competition is, what other products are on the market, and how they are doing, at a basic level. Theodore Levitt's classic theory -- in under two minutes.

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Harvard Business Review

JANUARY 26, 2015

While working with a huge Russian hydrocarbon company in Texas last year, our innovation conversation quickly zeroed in on customers. The innovation roadmap was hauled out and reviewed less in the spotlight of global opportunities than the cold reflection of domestic politics. The unhappy innovation inference? No one disagreed.

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N2Growth Blog

OCTOBER 7, 2010

Lafley - The former Chairman and CEO of Proctor & Gamble gave a clinic on innovation. I’ve never heard anyone speak so fluently on the topic of innovation. Smart leaders spend more time on creativity than productivity.&# Steve Levitt - Author of Freakanomics and Super Freakanomics , Steve was superb.

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