The CEO’s Role in Business Model Reinvention

From the Magazine (January–February 2011)

Artwork: Damián Ortega, Concrete Cube (black), 2003, cast concrete with black pigment

Summary.

Consider a few of the great innovation stories of the past decade: Google, Netflix, and Skype. Now ask yourself, why wasn’t Google created by Microsoft? Netflix by Blockbuster? Skype by AT&T?

A version of this article appeared in the January–February 2011 issue of Harvard Business Review.

Vijay Govindarajan is the Coxe Distinguished Professor at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business, a Dartmouth-wide chair and the highest distinction awarded to Dartmouth faculty; a Faculty Partner in the Silicon Valley incubator Mach49; and Senior Advisor at the strategy consulting firm Acropolis Advisors. He is a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author. His latest book is Fusion Strategy: How Real-Time Data and AI Will Power the Industrial Future. His Harvard Business Review articles “Engineering Reverse Innovations” and “Stop the Innovation Wars” won McKinsey Awards for best article published in HBR. His HBR articles “How GE Is Disrupting Itself” and “The CEO’s Role in Business Model Reinvention” are HBR all-time top-50 bestsellers. Follow him on LinkedIn.

@vgovindarajan

Chris Trimble is on the faculties of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice. He is the author of How Physicians Can Fix Health Care: One Innovation at a Time.

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The CEO’s Role in Business Model Reinvention

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