The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business

As technological development has increasingly driven the world economy, many observe that it causes a disruptive economic effect. New technology can humble big players and lift new players to leading positions. These effects often happen despite managers doing all the “right things.”

We now have enough data to begin to analyze how technological disruptions happen across many industries. More importantly, we have data about how to manage innovation’s turbulence. In this classic text, Clayton Christensen helps us understand this phenomenon in depth and then teaches us how to milk it to our advantage and our survival.

I work in software development for biomedical research, so in my career, I have observed firsthand how creative show more disruptions can reorient fields and industries many times. I’ve even done it some myself. I certainly understand how managers could fear it, and reading books like Christensen’s can demystify it significantly. In fact, if someone truly wants to understand how to strategically plan for disruptive technologies, this book is essential reading. Why? It defined the approach back in the 1990s.

In typical erudite fashion, Christensen uses the stories of various industries to tell his story. He especially relies upon the disk-drive industry in early computing to define his terms. This industry had a quick pace of innovation while also having lots of market information available. Each change from large disk drives to smaller models, or from more expensive models to cheaper models, disrupted the trajectory of the entire industry. New winners and losers came out in the fallout. Such well-documented details allow for easy construction of theoretical models.

Then Christensen tests these theoretical lens on different industries that don’t have all the speedy development of modern computing. He describes disruptive technologies in the context of mechanical construction equipment, for instance. Though the turnover rate is slower here, the patterns still hold.

Finally, he suggests ways to enhance the successful development and deployment of disruptive technologies. He suggests that most larger companies continue to focus on refining existing technologies while they christen smaller companies with the task of finding emerging markets for their survival.

I innovate in academic environments that seek broad implementation. Administratively, we organize ourselves in small groups that takes risk to create big changes at times. So Christensen’s paradigm certainly makes sense me. It also correlates well with how actual technological change has taken place since I first started paying attention to it in the 1990s.

Because modern technology affects just about every industry today, leading managers need to pay attention to the concepts of creative disruptions and disruptive technology. Technologists like myself can also benefit from learning to speak their business colleagues’ language to enhance their work’s effect. There’s no better place to accomplish either of these tasks than from the work that first defined the concept. show less

I've been trying to get a handle on what innovation is for a while, and Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen is a solid introduction to the corporate perspective. Christensen's study is based on the difference between disruptive and sustaining innovations in business, focusing primarily on hard drives but looping into backhoes and motorcycles, along with other topics.

Christensen's big result is that leading firms tend to fail when faced with disruptive innovation, losing out to new entrants. This is paradoxically the fault of 'good management', listening to customers and investing effort in improving the product. A focus on existing markets leaves the firm unable to grasp opportunities, and vulnerable to disruption from show more below as entrants push from marginal markets into the mainstream.

Christensen's model of resources, processes, and organizational values is a useful way of looking at how a business makes money, and his data collection is comprehensive, if narrowly focused. From a management perspective, Christensen's work is pessimistic. The only way for an firm to catch a new technology is to set up an essentially independent unit, and if it succeeds, put it at the top of the old business. I'm not sure how realistic that is right now, given the poor performance of electronics conglomerates like Sony, and the rise of cloud and hardware based silos run by Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, etc.

And finally, while I get that innovation is hard to manage and capture and economic return off of, Christensen doesn't address the larger context of what innovation is, or under what circumstances it is desirable or undesirable.

Since this is the first of May, maybe that old anti-globalization chant is right: "Disease, starvation, will not solved by corporations. That's bullshit, get off it, the enemy is profit!" show less

You'd like to think that a book this widely praised must have risen above the most obvious pitfalls, but in this case it actually didn't. Christensen is looking at "disruptive technologies" in retrospect, pointing out what could have been done to capitalize on them, but he misses an obvious point: It's rarely apparent which technologies will be "disruptive" before the fact. And any company that applies his prescriptions to every potentially disruptive technology that comes its way will use a lot of time & resources following dead ends. Until they go bankrupt, that is.

(As an aside: I'm no businessman, and am not really that interested in how businesses run. I read this because it was required for a class on emerging technologies, and for show more the life of me I can't figure out why it was required. But that's a criticism of the instructor, not this book.) show less

This is a well articulated classic text that describes the nature of certain technological development and how path dependence leads to setting the stage to subsequent disruption by other players. The ideas in this book have shaped the start-up business philosophy in important ways. We now take as a given that many large players will fail because of technological lock-in opening up to competition from more nimble start-ups.
But as important as this book is, reading the original calls into question the generality of the idea: not every business and technology leads to lock in exposed to subsequent disruption.

This book has had a deep impact on the way I think about technology and products and the decisions I have made at work. I tend to be an idealist. I tend to want the "best" solution. The Innovator's dilemma helped me finally understand why "worse is better" in many cases. I think anyone working in the technology field needs to expect radical change that will come from technology that is "worse" than the current state of the art and to be prepared to cannibalize existing products and markets by embracing these distributive technologies.

I must admit I breezed through this one. Not because the information is bad but because the information is now a standardized focus in any good business book (of which I have read not a few). But, gathering from his premise, this information was not as widely known when he published the book, therefore I didn't think it was worth docking stars.

Interestingly, his information regarding older firms going under because of new firms' unseen strengths has played out. Particularly telling was his comparison on Kmart beating out Sears(yes, even 20 years ago Sears was struggling). Looking now at the defunct-ing Kmart/Shopko superstores, they have (as he predicted) forgotten what got them there in the first place and are now being lambasted by show more stores like Target and Walmart who jumped on the Amazon(aka innovative tech) bandwagon.

Final point that I thought was brilliant: you can't predict what will be the new thing because the customer doesn't know what it is/wants until that new thing actually exists. Take that HiTech and Sandra Foster (#[b:Bellwether|24985|Bellwether|Connie Willis|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1431535122s/24985.jpg|1194887]). show less

Some books are important when they are new and not so important twenty years later. This is one of those. With this book Clayton Christensen made the term "disruptive technology" mainstream and created a new language when discussing technological and market evolution. Now we are used to that term. iPhone was disruptive, Internet was disruptive, the web was disruptive, anything that makes parts of the market obsolete is disruptive.

But now, 20 years later, the book has been so successful that it is not really needed. It talks about things that most people that care have already learned.

Basically: Smaller organizations are better at handling small opportunities that may later be large business. Larger companies can't both handle the large show more business and the small opportunities.

I think he's right but it's no help when trying to find those small opportunities that will later become large businesses and that is the hard problem. If you solve that part, then sure, this book says it's best to handle it in a completely (very completely) separate organization from the "business as usual" or one or both branches will suffer badly.

The most interesting part is the historical comparisons, mostly from the retail industry and the disk drive industry. Disk drives went from 14 inch packs to 8 inch floppy disks to 5.25 inch floppy disks to 3.5 inch not so floppy disk. This is basically where the book ends though he mentions 1.8 inch disks as well. (We now know that there was no next step evolutionary step, zip disks don't count. The next step was instead a combination of CD-ROM/RW and flash disks, and network connected storage.)

One good thing with the edition I consumed is that it was short. Could maybe have been even shorter, but it's rare that (American) authors present their ideas compactly. Too hard to sell short books I think which is a bit crazy. I see that some other reviews complain that it's too repetitive so I realize my edition was a shortened version. show less