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

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

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W**N

A classic favorite of executive level managers

I picked up this book after hearing the "innovator's dilemma" alluded to in several interviews by different CEOs. After reading this interesting piece on business strategy, it is no surprise why executive level management teams enjoy quoting this book. Innovator's Dilemma is a thoroughly researched investigation into an age old business phenomenon: How do businesses who were once dominant players in their industry get displaced by smaller, upcoming rivals?Well documented and lush with real world examples, The Innovator's Dilemma details case studies from a variety of industries where large corporations had the dominant market share and then abruptly lost it to upcoming rivals that seemed to come out of the blue. Did these "good" companies fail because of poor management? Were these companies blindsided because their organizations were too bureaucratic to react to the marketplace? "No", says the The Innovator's Dilemma. Many times, a even when a large corporation follows conventional business school training and "does all the right things", it can still be overcome by a smaller, nimbler newcomer to the market.Two kinds of marketplace changes are outlined: incremental (sustaining) and disruptive technologies. While the R&D efforts of large companies respond well to incremental changes in technology, they perform poorly against disruptive changes in technology. A disruptive change is when a new technology starts off catering to the needs of a low-end niche market, and then through incremental improvements, becomes a viable contender to the larger dominant players up-market. A host of examples are reviewed to show how this change takes place: the churn of dominant disk drive manufacturers, the shift from cable-based ground excavators to hydraulic excavators, the rise of low-volume high turnover retailers like K-Mart versus the low turnover department store models, the proliferation of small steel manufacturing plants.This book explores why large corporations are so unequipped to deal with disruptive changes. Surprisingly, they often yield to disruptive changes in their marketplace not because of poor management, but because the goals and objectives of such large corporations causes them to overlook the threat posed by the newcomer. Think of how IBM overlooked the advent of the PC because they had the mindset, "Why would anyone need a personal computer in their home?"Although written in 2002, changes in the marketplace over the last ten years have only given its ideas confirmation. We have seen the Innovator's Dilemma dynamic play out in Apple's iPhone upsetting the dominant Blackberry, the Kindle replace traditional channels of publishing, and the rise of cloud computing beginning to displace established "big business" ERP companies. The Innovator's Dilemma is an informative and fun read executive teams, marketing managers, entrepreneurs, and anyone with an interest in business strategy.

L**T

Trying hard isn't enough

We are all familiar with the story of the innovative and nimble startup surpassing the corporate leader with a disruptive technology that the larger corporation was blind to. Why this happens is the subject of Clayton Christensen's thoughtful Innovator's Dilemma. Although originally published in 1997, it's a highly relevant and useful read today.Christensen was interested in how the market leaders missed the disruptive innovations. At the time, most thought the corporate leaders were just too arrogant or too bureaucratic to see the disruption coming. Could there be more structural forces at play? Turns out, there are.The first half of the book follows the development of the disk drive and the hydraulic excavator to understand and make clear these forces. First, the author distinguishes between sustaining technologies and disruptive technologies. Market leaders, it turns out, are capable of innovation but those innovations typically occur as incremental evolutionary changes to existing products - sustaining innovations.Where they get tripped up is the development of disruptive technologies which fundamentally transform the existing product. In many cases the market leader also developed early forms of the disruptive technology or were at least aware of the development of the technology.Christensen, a professor at the Harvard Business School, makes the case that in ignoring the disruptive technology, the market leader was acting quite rationally. They were following their customers' and corporation's best interests.Christensen discovered that the disruptive technology yields a product that is inferior as measured by the traditional metrics for product quality. In the case of the disk drive it was price/unit storage. For the excavators, it was reach. For the disk drives, the disruption was the introduction of smaller and smaller drives. At each step of the way, these products were costlier than the existing larger drives in terms of price/unit storage. However, their advantages, in terms of other characteristics such as size, weight, and power consumption outweighed nominal improvement in the price/unit storage ratio provided by sustaining technologies. Eventually, price catches up and the disruptive products are better in both sets of characteristics.For the excavator (a big digger), the existing machines used cables to extend and control the basket. The overriding measure of performance was reach and capacity - how far out could the basket reach and grab a bucket of dirt. When hydraulic excavators appeared, their reach was very limited because of the physics of the hydraulic cylinders needed to control the baskets. Even today, a cable excavator will give you a longer reach. However, the hydraulic excavators had advantages of safety (no cable breaks) and had significantly lower maintenance costs. Eventually, as manufacturing of hydraulic excavators grew in practice, reach extended and for many uses such as building foundation excavation and utility pipe laying, as soon as the reach was sufficient for the task, the improvement in safety and the reduced maintenance costs made the hydraulic excavators superior.This book will change the way you think about innovation and the structures needed not only to spark the ideas, but get them built into new product lines.

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