The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth

This appears to offer significant explanatory power relative to other theories, as well as direct leverage for any firm to consider. Since the underlying factors are generally not quantifiable, it's likely that many relevant firms and leaders will miss it. ( )

I have read this book so often that it is falling apart! Seriously, the important discovery was the concept of "jobs to be done" categorizing innovation discovery. I have used this concept to widen my view to experiment with new ideas at my own work (Telecommunications). Mr. Christensen has a company web site with additional information and works in progress.
www.innosight.com ( )

I have just been reading Clay Christensen's "The Innovator's Solution" (follow up the "The Innovator's Dilemna"), in which the author makes some telling points.

One of the most interesting is his discussion of how you form a good theory about management. To him, the key is to categorize the observations or phenomena you make correctly and he chides consultants for advising the same soltion that has worked for a few excellent companies (since it is very rare that many companies are in exactly the same circumstances). Unless you have exhausted the circumstances of when and where the solution won't work, you haveb't got a complete theory and can't describe what is truly happening.

Unfortunately, this mistake happens all the time in agencies and consultancies. We glibly cite Starbucks, Nike etc. as paragons of great advertising and proscribe them as solutions. But to few of us really understand why things worked when they did (except for thos on the client side or who worked on the business). This is the problem with the whole concept of best practices - best for what when.

Incidentally, Christensen uses a similar argument to take on segmentation in a riff that is similar to previous articles in Nilewide. He criticizes segmentation on attributes (of products or people) because the mathematics involved only look at the correlation between attributes and outcomes. Applying his argument, we need to segment on the circumstances of the job customers want a product to fulfill (emotional, functional, personal) vs focusing on the product or person.

Circumstancial marketing was used by Sony's Akio Morita to drive that company's innovation ro disrupt the market (e.g. Targeting cheap portable radios at teens in the 1960's because any music was better than none). When Morita left, Sony stopped doing this and they haven't really had a disruptive innovation since ( e.g. PSP was a late market entrant vs a first)