Rating: 
Summary: Insightful, revolutionary, and inspiring
Review: The Innovator's Dilemma is one of the few books that warrants a second reading. The book is filled with crucial information that helps explain revolutionary technologies and the impact such technologies have on business.Christensen has a very clear and concise writing style that lends credibility to his arguments. The book is very well focused and effectively delivers a strong message.
Rating:
Summary: This is a great book for budding revolutionaries!
Review: This is a great book because it points out why, and how, opportunities continually open up in markets. It tells large companies where they are vulnerable. It also points out to budding revolutionaries ways to attack a large company. I also knew that it was hard for a high-end company to attack the low end or middle market and now I know why. I say that this book is an instant classic. One of my top ten business books.
Rating:
Summary: An Excellent and Thought Provoking Book
Review: I work for a small, very high technology that has been in business for 50 years. This book really calls into question some of our strategies for the future. Are we developing disruptive or sustaining technologies? Are we staying too close to our customers in the federal government? I need to reread this book again and discuss its implications with my work team. I recommend it highly. It is very well researched and written.
Rating:
Summary: Sycophants Beware!
Review: Businesses that employ sycophantic practices must adopt a new paradigm in order to subsist. Christensen's logic is inexorably favorable towards the intransignetly individualistics businesses that shun their competior's sycophantic practices. All you sycophants-you blind conformists to societal and business norms- you must beware!
Rating:
Summary: "Watch your Bottom", could be the subtitle of this book.
Review: Clayton Christensen offers a spellbinding account of how inferior technologies can overwhelm and displace. If you ever wondered about the similarities between sailing ships, steam shovels and disk drives, you must read this book. If you are a productline planner, strategist, venture capitalist, then read this book (unless you are my competitor). Mr Christensen also theorizes upon, as well as chronicles tactics to harness innovation. If any "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", then any "suffiently disruptive technology is indistinguishable from the mundane", might be a thesis of this work. Another might be "The evils of listening to your customers!"
Rating: 
Summary: A new paradigm
Review: We have all seen large, powerful, and successful corporations upstaged and driven out of business by startups using new ideas to grow exponentially and dominate the new business landscape. In his book "The Innovator's Dilemma," Clayton M. Christensen provides a unique and novel theory that explains why entrenched corporations often fail to capitalize on such new ideas, and fall prey to firms with fewer initial resources. With enough data and case histories to make even the skeptic sit up and take notice, Christensen sculpts an argument that demands our attention at once. Step by step he shows that such extinctions come about not necessarily because of arrogance and dogmatism (though these play their parts) but because of the architectural and organizational structures that make good companies good. Like Einstein's theory of relativity, with its concepts of relative time and space, some of Christensen's conclusions seem unintuitive. Others even seem contrary to phy! sical reality. Sometimes it really is wrong to listen to your customers. Sometimes it is better to build a product with low margin and a limited market rather than build a product with high margin and large, virtually guaranteed market. Christensen builds his thesis upon the notion that technology comes in two broad flavors: sustaining and disruptive. Established product lines use sustaining technology to make incremental improvements. In the language of biology, sustaining technology facilitates gradual Darwinian evolution where incremental improvements coupled with survival of the fittest lead to gradual product improvement. For example, tire manufacturers use sustaining technology to enhance the tread, sidewall, and belt design of automotive tires. Sustaining technology is not trivial, and often involves tremendous expenditures of capital. It is, however, what established companies do best, and these companies have developed very effective organizational and manag! erial structures for dealing with it. Disruptive technol! ogy, on the other hand, approaches product evolution outside the sustaining envelope. Disruptive technologies typically offer a cheaper solution to a small, often unidentified subgroup. Once established within this small market the disruptive technology evolves through sustaining technology until it eventually satisfies the performance criteria of more traditional markets. When this happens, the disruptive technology bursts onto the scene, attacking the soft underbelly of the established corporations, often with fatalistic consequences. In the parlance of evolutionary biology, disruptive technology is like punctuated evolution; fast with significant changes in the gene pool. Christensen may be excused for lacking the breadth to discuss similarities between such diverse fields as biology and business management. Still, the book would have benefited immeasurably by a co-author in the field who might have offered greater insight into universal principles governing the evol! ution of complex systems. Repeatedly I found myself going to books by authors such as Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould to refine my mental image of the multidimensional landscape in which biological organisms and industrial businesses compete for the resources of survival. The book is well written and persuasive in its arguments. It questions many established ideas and shows that often these ideas fail to apply to disruptive technologies. Often the best corporations are especially susceptible. Defense against disruptive technologies does not come from being smarter and working closer with customers. Paradoxically, working closely with customers and following established rules for corporate investment often make a company more susceptible to harm from disruptive technologies. Companies naturally evolve toward higher-end products with greater margins. Consequently, they find it difficult to enter markets with disruptive technologies that often begin with low margi! ns, are technologically simple, and do not have a clearly d! efined customer base. Such markets are ideal for start-up firms. The author suggests, with several case histories, that one of the best ways for established firms to deal with disruptive technologies is to spin off autonomous organizations that exist within the economic constraints of disruptive technologies. The author does an excellent job of using examples, drawing most from the disk-drive industry. He also includes examples from the computer, motorcycle, steel, automotive, and earth-moving industries as well. In each case he explains how disruptive technologies emerged and often destroyed well-run companies that were following all the established rules. This drives home the fact that disruptive technologies pose such a great risk precisely because they can destroy industries not only in spite, but because they follow established business practices. After describing disruptive technologies, with historical cases to illustrate points, the author ends with a case st! udy involving electric vehicles. I found this chapter to be among the weakest, and something of a distraction from the more substantial earlier material. Ironically, in the process of trying to frame electric vehicles as disruptive technology, the author seems to have missed one of the best examples of a disruptive technology, and one that nearly destroyed America's foremost industries: small cars. Overall, Christensen's work is on a high academic level, though some of the technical material is inconsistent. For example, the ordinates in figures 1.4, 1.5, and 6.1 disagree with each other. The text on page 128 also disagrees with figure 6.1, while the text on page 150 disagrees with figure 7.1. These may be simple examples of typographical errors, but they lessen confidence in the book's technical accuracy. On the positive side, the book has excellent organization and lots of pertinent examples, as well as extensive notes and documentation. The index is also very co! mplete and thorough. Though Christensen's ideas are new! and radical they are so lucid, logical, and clear that anyone involved in American business cannot afford to ignore them. Duwayne Anderson
Rating:
Summary: A rare book - new insight into market dynamics and strategy!
Review: A thoroughly readable and enjoyable book with the author bringing new insight into an extensively researched area.
Rating:
Summary: Good analysis of technology vs. management
Review: Original thinking that helps us understand some of the dynamics of technological progress and explains why the Davids continue to beat the Goliaths. A must for the paranoid (like Andy Grove) who want to survive. The book shows again that traditional best practices in management are good at managing incremental product improvement, but have enormous difficulty in dealing with truly unusual developments. The disruptive technologies are not the Nobel Prize-winning inventions but initially inferior technologies that are easy to overlook.
Rating:
Summary: OK - so prove your point
Review: Starts by turning the idea of "good management" completely on its head. OK - if you can prove it. I'm not sure yet that Christensen has proven his points; I've only read the book twice. But he makes sense. Alot of the roadblocks I've encountered personally in bring innovative practices or technologies into organizations start to make sense in light of Christensen's analysis. Read this book!
Rating:
Summary: Best business book I've ever read. Period.
Review: In Jan/Feb '95, the author, Clayton Christensen coauthored a seminal paper in the Harvard Business Review called "Disruptive Technologies...". For 3 years now I, my coworkers, and my managers have passed that paper around and watched organizations succeed and fail following EXACTLY the strategies described in that '95 paper. Imagine my delight that Christensen has now published (and expanded) his ideas in a book. The book contains incredibly thorough research, is very well written, and is applicable to a wide range of businesses. Make sure you read the whole book - there are gems scattered from cover to cover. Pay particular attention to the concept he calls 'value networks' - and how difficult it is for an organization to change these.
| 
