Chapter 8
Commercializing Emerging Technologies through Complementary Assets
In order for companies of new technologies to be successful commercialization they need to build and understand complementary assets. The chapter uses Mergenthaler Linotype as an example of a company that stayed competitive even with changing market and gives reasons for their success.
Three challenges of commercialization
Emerging technologies change the relevant complementary assets, customers, and competitors of the firm.

Complementary assets
To benefit from innovation, a firm must possess additional asets called complementary assets. These assets include resources like access to distribution, service capability, customer and supplier relationships, and complementary products. Also, it is important to note that some new technologies can actually make complementary assets needed for success less valuable or obsolete. For this reason, firms need to evaluate the transition to identify which complementary assets are currently important, as well as those that will be important with the new technology regime.

Customers
Firms should also examine the technology’s impact on customers. By knowing how the technology will affect the capabilities of their customers, firms can develop a strategy to help preserve the existing customer capabilities and also build new ones.

Competitors
Emerging technologies reshape the competitive landscape of the market. Firms can gain a deeper understanding of these new competitors by analyzing emerging social networks of the new technology. This includes visiting trade shows, technical conferences and e-mails.

The last part of the chapter summarizes the section by going over the three hurdles of emerging technologies: first, making the decision to invest in the emerging technology, second, developing the new technology, and third, commercialization of the technology.

Chapter 9
Strategy making in uncertain environments
This chapter argues that discipline and imagination by themselves are not effective ways to strategize emerging technologies. Instead, they say, firms should use a mixture of the two in what they call “disciplined imagination”.

Discipline
Discipline is the consistant use of rules ot evaluate alternatives. Discipline is chatacterized by consistency and does not necessarily require formal planning. It is linked to greater consensus among top managers because it is seen as more judicious. Discipline also led to more inclusinve process for making strategic decisions that was associated with improved performance in stable environments.
Unfortunately, once market environments became unstable, discipline fell short. Four major issues arise when discipline alone is used to strategize emerging technologies:
the firm falling into a rut of automatic thinking and analyzing instead of synthesizing
instead of firm framing the problem the strategies are meant to solve it spends time evaluating the strategies already
the firm puts emphasis on history and tries to use it on a novel situations, misleading strategy makers
relaying on information that lacks breadth for a meaningful analysis

Imagination
Strategy making processes that exhibit imagination have a “deliberate diversity” in the way strategist define problems and find alternative solutions. It is important in imagination that alternatives are distinct and varied. Unfortunately, imagination can lead to:
a feeling of chaos
the firm undervaluing the past
individuals involved in the strategy process losing having their creativity diluted
a slowing of the strategy process

On the other hand, disciplined imagination combines both to cerate a diverse set of options by encouraging creative thinking, but also grounding the process by choosing the options created with creativity by rigorously evaluating them and systematically developing and implementing them. Basically, it combines a process for generating diverse options with another for evaluating them consistently.

Some firms use disciplined imagination alternate between periods of idea generation and periods of idea evaluation to create strategy. Other firms preserve discipline and imagination in separate departments and combine them when necessary.

Lastly, it is important for firms to recognize that separating the two may not be beneficial and that it is important for the firm to dismount the present formal system and use imagination to create a new way of making strategy and THEN brings back discipline into the process.