Teece's Win-Lose Innovation Model

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Protect your innovations and get ahead of the competition.

How do you protect your innovations? You might have a great idea. You might even start to gain market share. But, often all it takes is for a bigger, cash-rich organization to come along, replicate your idea and essentially push you out of the market.

Organizational theorist and business professor, David Teece's Win-Lose Innovation Model explains how companies can protect their innovations and benefit from them. [1]

In this article, we'll examine Teece's theory, and we'll explore how you can use it to capitalize on your innovations and stay ahead of the competition.

What Is Teece's Win-Lose Innovation Model?

Teece describes two kinds of organizations – innovators and imitators. Innovators are the first to commercialize a new product or service. Imitators are competitors who copy an aspect of that new product or service, and market it as their own.

Imitators often profit more than innovators because they adapt the original design, protect their product, and secure the resources they need to achieve commercial success.

To make sure that you – not an imitator – succeed with your innovation, you need to think about the following three areas:

1. Protecting the Idea ("Appropriability Regime")

Imagine that you have an exciting idea for a new product or design. You've got to protect it before your competitors (the imitators) come along and copy it. Without the proper protection, you won't be able to profit from the innovation that you worked so hard to develop.

At this stage, it may be appropriate to apply for effective intellectual property rights (IPR) protection. Depending on governing law, you should secure patents and register copyrights to prevent your competitors from using your intellectual property.

It's important to lock in your ideas legally as early as you sensibly can, but it's not always easy. You need to do legal work meticulously, to avoid creating loop-holes that allow imitators to move in and take your innovations.

2. Finding the Dominant Design ("Dominant Design Paradigm")

Once your product is out in the market, your competitors can deconstruct it to understand what's unique about it, and then launch their own competing, and perhaps improved, variants. You need to respond to this, and this can then lead to competitive cycles of improvement, until one design   emerges as a "winner" or "dominant design" by meeting customers' needs most effectively.

Adapting an existing idea is often easier and faster than coming up with a new one, so your competitors may be able to do this quite quickly. They can develop variations of your basic design, analyze how the market responds, and dedicate all of their resources to producing and marketing the version that received the most positive reaction. You need to anticipate their actions, and work fast to ensure that your design comes out as the dominant one.

According to Teece, achieving the dominant design is influenced by collateral assets (such as marketing channels and brand image), government and industry regulations, and technological advances within the industry. However, a dominant design will pay for an organization to invest in the systems and infrastructure that will ensure that its success continues.

3. Reaching Scale Quickly ("Complementary Assets")

Successful innovators know that capturing a niche in the market takes more than coming up with a good design. Even a great technological innovation   will be wasted without the ability to scale marketing   , production, sales, human resources, customer service   , and other parts of an organization's infrastructure aggressively and successfully.

As the market becomes more competitive, you may also require specialized support to help you to commercialize your product successfully. For example, imagine that you've come up with a new engine design. You'll need specially adapted repair facilities and tools to support it.

Some companies may choose to develop all of these services internally, while others might outsource to external suppliers. However, many will use a combination of the two.

How to Use Teece's Model

You can incorporate Teece's model into your business planning process   . For example, if you develop a great product   , but it has design flaws that leave it vulnerable to imitation, solid legal protection will buy you time to create a dominant design and put the necessary support services in place.

In other words, if you've secured solid patents for your product, and put in place the marketing and distribution channels to support it, you'll have more time to find the design that meets your customers' needs most effectively before the competition   steps in.

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Let's look at how you can apply each step of Teece's model to your innovations:

• Protecting the idea – can you patent or protect your product, or do you have some other way of retaining control of it? (For example, if you're using a key resource, have you secured an exclusive supply of it?)

  If not, it's important to realize that you may have little power to protect your idea, and that others can easily profit from it.
  
  You'll need to move very quickly once you've launched to protect your idea. Or you'll need to look for alternatives – venture capitalists are unlikely to invest in an idea that they can't either protect or scale quickly. So you'll also need to ask yourself if it's worth investing your own time and money to do this.

• Finding the dominant design – is your product's design easy for your competitors to imitate? Can you develop a design that will protect you from duplication? Make sure that you plan how to deal with any dominant competitors – Game Theory   can be useful here.
  
  You'll also need to plan how you'll develop your marketing and distribution channels and your brand image before you launch your new design. By doing this, you can strengthen your position when competitors enter the market.
  
  In this stage, you need to gear up to iterate as fast as you can through minimum viable products   and build-measure-learn loops   , so that it's you who develops and exploits the dominant design, not the competition.

• Reaching scale quickly – do you have the capability to optimize your resources quickly, in the necessary areas? Can you quickly scale up production and put into place the marketing and distribution channels needed to get your product to market in a high-quality way? If not, can you partner with someone who can? Or perhaps license your idea to a major player in the market?