Competing

This chapter (“Competing”) considers how new technology competes for space in an initial beachhead market. In doing so, it identifies and discusses three major competitive strategies: confrontational, contextual, and timing. Important conclusions drawn from these discussions include (1) close collaboration between the beachhead and future mainstream market is vital to obtain competitive advantage in the former and to accelerate transfer of technology to the latter; (2) compressing the R&D cycle to speed up initial entrance into the beachhead is a powerful competitive tactic; (3) two new skills or levers of survival not used in the “creation” and “targeting” phases of R&D are now important: technical flexibility of scale and identification and connection to an external context; (4) new and advanced technologies in the field of informatics—including quantum computing—are beginning to be used to further compress the R&D cycle.