Co-innovation Risk can be a major reason for failure, because you can’t do everything yourself, as Nokia learned the hard way !
Nokia entered the fray to deliver the first 3G handset to the European market. It believed its competition with Ericsson was a classic race for first-mover advantage: that operators and customers would embrace the first quality device to market.
But focused as they were on executing better than their competition, they were blindsided by co-innovation risk. As Nokia, and the entire sector, would learn: this was just a race to the starting line.
They would need to wait there for years before co-innovators were ready and the real race to profits could begin. Had they used a wider lens, they would have done things differently.
Notes from The Wide Lens by Ron Adner