By Bill Meade, President – Basic IP Management, Inc.
bill@basicip.com
http://www.basicip.com
James M. Utterback’s (1994) MASTERING THE DYNAMICS OF INNOVATION is one of my favorite books. Utterback has lately been squeezed between Clayton Christensen’s work on disruptive innovation and Geoffrey Moore’s work on market structure and shareholder wealth management. But, I think Utterback deserves reading by patent attorneys.
First, because, Utterback’s book is just plain fun for a technology person to read. It has competition case histories of the typewriter (p. 1), automobiles (p. 34), television (p. 38), transistors (p. 41), calculators, (p. 42), disk drives (p. 46), and many other one-time high-tech industries. Second, I think Utterback deserves reading because his dominant design model has many uses in constructing defenses and offenses in patent litigation.