on 10-Mar-2019 (Sun)

it was quickly realized that, if a fission event produced neutrons, each of these neutrons might cause further fission events

Free neutrons, while not directly ionizing atoms, cause ionizing radiation.

A free neutron is unstable, decaying to a proton, electron and antineutrino with a mean lifetime of just under 15 minutes ( 7002881500000000000♠ 881.5 ± 1.5 s ).

At a fundamental level, all strategies for Porter boil down to two very broad options:

1. Do what everyone else is doing (but spend less money doing it)
2. Do something no one else can do.

Competing by doing what everyone else is doing means, he says, competing on price (that is, learning to be more efficient than your rivals). But that just shrinks the pie as, in the rush to the bottom, profitability declines for the entire industry.

tools explicitly designed to foster creativity.

A number of such tools already exist, often in practitioner-friendly forms. In “How Strategists Really Think: Tapping the Power of Analogy” (HBR, April 2005), Giovanni Gavetti and Jan W. Rivkin

In this article I explore four approaches to building a breakthrough strategy:

1. Contrast. The strategist should identify—and challenge—the assumptions undergirding the company’s or the industry’s status quo. This is the most direct and often the most powerful way to reinvent a business.
2. Combination. Steve Jobs famously said that creativity is “just connecting things”; many smart business moves come from linking products or services that seem independent from or even in tension with one another.
3. Constraint. A good strategist looks at an organization’s limitations and considers how they might actually become strengths.
4. Context. If you reflect on how a problem similar to yours was solved in an entirely different context, surprising insights may emerge.

How to Begin

• List the “incompetencies” (rather than the competencies) of your organization—and test whether they can in fact be turned into strengths.
• Consider deliberately imposing some constraints to encourage people to find new ways of thinking and acting.

What to Watch Out For

Successful businesses face few obvious constraints; people may feel no need to explore how new ones might create new opportunities.

An entire field, biomimetics, is devoted to finding solutions in nature to problems that arise in engineering, materials science, medicine, and elsewhere. For example, the burrs from the burdock plant, which propagate by attaching to the fur of animals via tiny hooks, inspired George de Mestral in the 1940s to create a clothing fastener that does not jam (as zippers are prone to do). Thus the invention of Velcro. This is a classic problem-solving technique. Start with a problem in one context, find another context in which an analogous problem has already been solved, and import the solution.

How to Begin Explain your business to an outsider in another industry. Fresh eyes from a different context can help uncover new answers and opportunities. Engage with lead users, extreme users, and innovation hotspots. What to Watch Out For Businesses need to focus on internal processes to deliver on their current value propositions—but the pressure to focus internally can get in the way of learning from the different contexts in which other players operate.

At its core, strategy is still about finding ways to create and claim value through differentiation. That’s a complicated, difficult job. To be sure, it requires tools that can help identify surprising, creative breaks from conventional thinking. But it also requires tools for analyzing the competitive landscape, the dynamics threatening that landscape, and a company’s resources and competencies.