Innovate Or Die!: Dartmouth Professor Richard D’Aveni Gives His Ultimatum To The Country….and Your Business!
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For years, Richard D’Aveni, the Bakala Professor of Strategy at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, had mastered the practice of long-term strategic planning for corporations. Taking current metrics and industry trends into account, he could take any company in any industry and lay out a five-year plan for sustainable growth and success.
But it took one of the most devastating storms in American history to wake Richard up the fact that his theory was just that: theory.
When Hurricane Bob ravaged the coast of New England in 1991, Richard D’Aveni was vacationing with his family on Cape Cod. The storm knocked out power for four days. When power finally came back on, and he was able to turn on a TV, what he saw that day floored him: the Soviet Union had collapsed.
One of the most powerful global political and economic entities was no more, and Richard missed it. And not just because power went out; for all of his reliance on theory and ideas about how economics SHOULD work, he didn’t see the reality of this collapse coming.
It was then that Richard decided to take the knowledge he had already accrued about strategic planning, and mix it up with some chaotic disruption, for good measure. And he widened the scope of his knowledge beyond the boardroom, to include domestic and global economies, and the role that the global competition plays in shaping how these countries react to their own “Hurricane Bob”‘s, drastic changes that can happen overnight and, without warning, destroy an unsuspecting economy (much like the Soviet Union.)
It was this line of thought that brought Richard his greatest acclaim, from best-selling books like “Hypercompetition” and “Strategic Capitalism” to his perennial status as one of the top business thinkers in the world, according to the world-renowned Thinkers50 list, a biannual review of the top 50 business and leadership minds in the world. (Richard was #11 in 2015).
On this edition of “The Raja Show” , Richard D’Aveni joins Raja to discuss the nature of competition in an ever-changing marketplace, and the role that innovation trends such as 3-D printing play in the ability of countries like the United States to remain, not only competitive, but economically superior to its international counterparts throughout the globe.
For those who want to root for the United States to defeat its global competition in ways that DON’T involve athletics, look no further than this show for the insights you need from one of the world’s most attuned economic minds.
