5. Great innovators are usually egotistical mavericks. Not any more (although there is no shortage of egotistical mavericks that would have you think otherwise). In the current decade there is more competitive differentiation to be gained through collaboration than through busting out on your own. That's because our extended supply chains reward each company for focusing on its core and outsourcing the rest of the offer to someone else in the chain. But actually orchestrating these chains to perform effectively in real time requires enormous innovation. And that is a job for people who listen well, empathize deeply, and make the differentiated performance of the chain as a whole as important as their own local success. In addition, many innovative technology companies are harnessing the hearts, minds, innovative skills of thousands of people through the open source movement. Many great innovators with audacious ambitions have the qualities of Tom Sawyer, getting other people to help them paint the fence - often for free - because they want to be a part of something great.

4. innovation is inherently disruptive. Not necessarily. To be sure, authors like Clay Christensen and myself have spent much of our life's work chronicling the impact of disruptive innovation, but it is only one type among many. And the more established your company, the less likely it is a type for you to specialize in. Alternatives include application innovation, product innovation, platform innovation, line extension innovation, design innovation, marketing innovation, experiential innovation, value engineering innovation, integration innovation, process innovation, value migration innovation, and acquisition innovation. This last one, in particular, is usually an established enterprise's best bet for dealing with disruption.

3. It is good to innovate. No, it is good to differentiate on an attribute that drives customer preference during buying decisions. Innovating elsewhere costs money and entails risk but does not create competitive advantage. It might still be worth doing, either to neutralize another company's competitive advantage or to improve your own productivity, but you would be surprised about the amount of innovation going on in your company right now that serves no economic purpose. Rather it is being undertaken as a form of corporate entertainment, creating the illusion of purpose and meaning while carefully skirting the need to be economically accountable.

2. Innovation is hard. Actually, it is not. What is hard is deploying innovation, especially in an established enterprise. That's because the critical deployment resources are all engaged trying to make the quarter on the back of the existing offer set in the existing market categories. They cannot be bothered with next-generation responsibilities when their current ones are hanging by a thread. The net result: Too often, when a genuinely innovative offer is ready to go to market, there is simply no one there to sponsor it, and it dies on the vine.

1. When innovation dies, it's because the antibodies kill it. Yes, but not how you think. The murder takes place in the customer's world, not in yours. Here's how. As a management team you hope to leverage the current relationships managed by your sales force to introduce the next-generation innovation. But the synergies implied by this tactic are revealed over time to be false - the current team does not have any relationships of merit with the new target customer. Instead it has legacy commitments to the old target customer who in turn is threatened by and resents the intrusion of the new innovation. Thus your own sales force finds itself more or less honor-bound to sabotage your next-generation effort. Whether they actually do or not, they are in no position to lead the kind of charge required, and it is no wonder when some piddly little start-up beats your finely tuned sales machine to the punch.

Geoffrey A. Moore's new book is Dealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their Evolution. Moore is managing director of TCG Advisors, venture partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures and best-selling author of Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado.

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