Agile PLM - The CIO's Guide to Oracle Products and Solutions - page 27

to reverse engineering the competitive product and determining which
features to adopt into your own product and then, essentially, one-upping
them by adding new and novel features and/or services.
For a company who is a defender of an established technology, the
S-curve predicts at what point their leadership position might decline.
Avoiding this should become their chief focus. Some companies—
Microsoft, for example—practice what I like to call continuous innova-
tion. They practice all of the techniques in this chapter and then some,
including operating Skunk Works, acquiring small companies that might
become rivals (e.g., Hotmail), and leapfrogging the attacker's technology.
This last technique is Microsoft's current tactic with the introduction of
their new MSN search engine, which nicely rivals the google.com power-
house. Microsoft, then, makes a good topic for a case history on knowl-
edge and innovation management.

P-Cycle

According to Davenport and Prusak (2003), the idealized life cycle of an
idea within an organization is called the P-cycle, so named because each
of its five stages starts with the letter P, i.e., progenitor, pilot, project, pro-
gram, perspective, and pervasiveness, as shown in Figure 1.4.
The authors suggest that successful idea practitioners understand each
idea's life cycle so that they can predict where it might move next. There is
an internal as well as an external life cycle, and these might differ for many
environmental reasons.
The P-cycle is somewhat similar to the traditional SDLC (systems devel-
opment life cycle) in that both start with someone's bright idea (the pro-
genitor). After a feasibility study has been performed, the next stage that

Program

Managerial
Awareness

Project

Perspective

Pilot

Progenitor Pervasiveness

Time

FIGURE 1.4
The P-cycle of a successful business idea.