The New Killer Apps: How Large Companies Can Out-Innovate Start-Ups

“An erudite anthem for large companies reshaping themselves to innovate and compete with agile startups.”
-- Kirkus Reviews A Kirkus Indie Books of the Month Selection and recipient of a Kirkus Star for "Exceptional Merit"

“An important book for the boards and managements of every company dealing with the avalanche of technological change.”
-- Jack Greenberg, Chairman of Western Union and former CEO of McDonald’s

“This book’s eight innovation rules represent the difference between big companies leveraging their assets or getting their assets whooped.”
-- Guy Kawasaki, Former chief evangelist of Apple and author of APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur

“This is the best business book I’ve read in very many years. It absolutely nails how to and how not to innovate.”
-- Sam Hill, Author of Radical Marketing and former chief marketing officer at Booz Allen

“Great work! The more I read, the more I couldn't put it down.”
-- Philip Fasano, Executive vice president, Kaiser Permanente and Author of Transforming Health Care

Overview

The New Killer Apps reverses the conventional wisdom that start-ups are destined to out-innovate big, established businesses. Through crisp analysis and compelling case studies, Mui and Carroll show that this just isn't true. Or, at least, it need not be. Yes, small and agile beats big and slow, but big and agile beats anyone. This book offers a roadmap for how large companies can Think Big, Start Small and Learn Fast. In doing so, they can get out of their own way, take advantage of their natural assets, and vanquish both traditional competitors and upstarts by nurturing and unleashing their own killer apps.

There's certainly a lot on the line. A perfect storm of technological innovation—combining smartphones and other mobile devices, ubiquitous cameras and sensors, social media and “big data” analytical tools—means that more than $36 trillion of stock-market value is up for what Mary Meeker at Kleiner Perkins is calling “reimagination.” Large companies will either do the reimagining and lay claim to the markets of the future or will be reimagined out of existence.

Table of Contents

Foreword by James Madara, M.D., CEO, American Medical Association

GETTING STARTED
Introduction: A Road Map for Corporate Innovation– Big and Agile Beats Anyone
Case Study: Google Cars and $2 Trillion in Auto-Related Revenue Up for Grabs

PHASE ONE: THINK BIG
Rule 1: Context Is Worth 80 IQ Points
Rule 2: Embrace Your Doomsday Scenario
Rule 3: Start with a Clean Sheet of Paper
Case Study: Carmakers Must Take a New Road

PHASE TWO: START SMALL
Rule 4: First, Let’s Kill All the Finance Guys
Rule 5: Get Everyone on the Same Page
Rule 6: Build a Basket of Killer Options
Case Study: Auto Insurance in a World Without Accidents

PHASE THREE: LEARN FAST
Rule 7: A Demo Is Worth a Thousand Pages of a Business Plan
Rule 8: Remember the Devil’s Advocate
Case Study: Are Hospitals DOA?

Conclusion

Afterword: Moving from Innovation to Invention

Chunka Mui is the coauthor of the bestselling "Unleashing the Killer App: Digital Strategies for Market Dominance." Paul Carroll wrote the bestselling "Big Blues: The Unmaking of IBM." Together, they also coauthored the award-winning "Billion Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn From the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years."