{"id":414,"date":"2006-06-01T14:46:07","date_gmt":"2006-06-01T20:46:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=414"},"modified":"2006-06-01T14:46:07","modified_gmt":"2006-06-01T20:46:07","slug":"complementary_i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=414","title":{"rendered":"Complementary innovation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In a recent <a href=\"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/archives\/2006\/05\/where_the_money.php\">post<\/a>, I talked about the central role that complements are playing in shaping the economics of the web. (Complements are products that tend to be consumed together, like popcorn and movies or blogs and Google ads.) In <a href=\"http:\/\/www.strategy-business.com\/press\/article\/06202\">Complementary Genius<\/a>, my latest column on innovation for Strategy &#038; Business, I take a broader look at complements and the different ways companies can use complementary innovation as a strategic weapon.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s how it begins:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>What were Andr\u00e9 and Edouard Michelin thinking? In 1900, shortly after the two brothers took control of their family\u2019s venerable rubber business in Clermont-Ferrand, France, they suddenly decided to publish a guidebook for tourists. Their Michelin Guide provided information on gas stations, hotels, restaurants, and roadside attractions along with various maps and driving tips. The brothers printed 35,000 copies of the first edition &#8211; and gave them away free.<\/p>\n<p>According to our contemporary notions of business logic, the move seems hard to justify. After all, book publishing has little to do with rubber processing. Management gurus, if they had existed then, might have chided the brothers for losing sight of their \u201ccore business\u201d and expanding beyond the scope of their \u201corganizational capabilities.\u201d They might even have used the story as a case study on why family businesses should bring in professional managers.<\/p>\n<p>But the diversification turned out to be an act of genius &#8230;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.strategy-business.com\/press\/article\/06202 \">Read on<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In a recent post, I talked about the central role that complements are playing in shaping the economics of the web. (Complements are products that tend to be consumed together, like popcorn and movies or blogs and Google ads.) In Complementary Genius, my latest column on innovation for Strategy &#038; Business, I take a broader [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=414"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}