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Summary: Illuminates Disruptive Innovation, Why Manager's Fail At It
Review: <P>
I was talking to a friend the other day about why major (multi-billion dollar a year) companies are not good at innovation, and he recommended this book. Wow! Looking at the companies I know and admire, it all became clear. Innovation *is* disruptive; the most promising marketplace is the opposite of their existing defense and intelligence clients--the people that do not get adequate intelligence support from the existing cash cow; and all of the middle and senior managers (Washington-based) are incrementalists who had succeeded at building bodies-for-hire accounts over decades.
For those who feel an intuitive faith in disruptive endeavors, this book is inspiring and also instructional. It specifically suggests that entrants will beat incumbents when the objective is to substitute lower-cost good-enough solutions for client needs that are not satisfied by high end production. However, it also makes clear that the *last* place you want to sell disruptive solutions in to is the existing high end client base. Go for new customers and new contexts.
In government intelligence terms: stop trying to teach the spies that they need to do a better job on open sources of information in 33+ languages. Instead, go after the Departments of State, Commerce, Treasury, Agriculture, Homeland Security, and the elements of the Department of Defense that do not get adequate classified intelligence support. Establish Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) as a viable endeavor there, and in ten years come back and crush the spies in head on competition.
Three "litmus tests" that the authors put forward are very helpful to those seeking to monetize disruptive new ideas:
1) Is there a population of clients that has historically been under-funded, under-staffed, and have as a result *gone without*?
2) Is this group likely to appreciate lower cost "good enough" solutions?
3) Is it possible to be profitable while providing these clients lower cost good enough solutions (e.g. monitoring risk around the world, at the sub-state level, something the spies simply cannot do effectively despite their $50 billion a year budget)?
Another major lesson I drew from this book is that alternative channels can be phenomenally successful. One example the book uses: instead of selling low-cost throw away cameras through photography shops oriented to high-end perfectionists, move them into grocery stores and discount stores for the low-end market that could not afford a traditional camera. This *makes sense.* Hence, instead of trying to sell low-cost open source services to the people who think they have the most to lose from promoting them (the mandarins of the high-cost secrets), go instead to the least well-served end-users, the logisticians, acquisition managers, diplomats, etcetera, and get them to test localized rather than centralized solutions that then "explode" as other end-users see the low-cost success and emulate through decentralized adoption of new best practices.
The last half of the book is loaded with stuff useful to how I am going to structure my relationship with any major corporation--it focuses on a number of key factors including scale, profitability over growth, proprietary end to end solutions in the beginning, transitioning rapidly to open distributed solutions at the right moment, and ensuring that the team members are *not* (NOT) incrementalist line managers that succeeded by going along within a status quo system.
The following quote captures my perception of the imperfection of the guys at the top that don't get it: "In many ways, the managers that corporate executives have come to trust the most because they have consistently delivered the needed results in core businesses cannot be trusted to shepherd the creation of new growth." (Page 183).
The book goes on to discuss the conflict between the traditional processes of managing traditional businesses, the conflict between traditional business values versus those of disruptive innovators (who can tend to alienate and aggravate executives used to having life just so), and between the "pace" of big organizations that need 12 months to think about an opportunity, and small "fleet of foot" innovators that can evaluate, act, write a proposal, and win million-dollar jobs over a week-end.
The authors are generally negative about business unit consolidation, and make the point that the bigger the business gets, the more process takes precedence over people. They specifically caution against a strategy of acquisition as a means of growth, documenting the terrible toll this can take as a cash flow drain, in essence saying that really big growth cannot come from incrementalist approaches. I put the book down with the feeling that the really big companies need to think seriously about launching spin-offs, as Charles Schwab did, and the really small companies, like mine, have a fighting shot at beating the hell out of the established beltway bandits who are too slow, too arrogant, and too rich to be serious about innovation for the future.
This book made me smile, and it made me think. Super piece of work.
Rating: 
Summary: Another Fad Business Book
Review: Alas for those of us who exist in the real world. It is demonstrably untrue that most of the major companies in the industry lost their leads to their competition because of "disruptive" technology. 32-bit OS/2 lost to a 16-bit shell riding on top of an 8-bit OS core (Windows 3.X). You might claim the PC was a "disruptive" system, but Dell is certainly no innovator, nor was Compaq nor was Gateway nor were any of the cloners. They just were more efficient manufacturers, hardly a disruptive "technology." Novell did not lose to NT because NT was disruptive; it lost because it actively discouraged third-party application development and refused to add a GUI to NetWare years after it was clear people wanted one. The Mac was "disruptive" yet a second-rate imitation ended up owning the GUI roost. MicroPro once owned word processing but failed because of an internal positioning war. Ashton-Tate crashed and burned because of a PR fiasco. WordPerfect introduced a stinker of a Windows product just as the market was turning to Windows because the head of the company didn't want to force his best programmers to leave their DOS code bases. CA has flourished by buying dying mainframe companies and milking installed bases. Borland nearly died by pursuing object-oriented programming, arguably a disruptive technology, and held up releases of its core products while it innovated itself into irrelevance. What does any of this have to do with disruption?The disk drive industry the authors used in "Dilemma" is not very disruptive; rather, it represents an industry that makes steady incremental progress on an underlying technology that has not changed since the 60's; spinning platters coated in metal oxides over which a metal boom rides reading data from magnetically charged particles. This has always been a commodity-driven industry, margins are intrinsically slim, and the key to success is managing the inventory flow as you move to a next generation of smaller, more densely packed platters. A well-run company can handle this and continue to make money at a nice clip if its internal business processes are geared to do this efficiently; Intel is the prime example. Is the Pentium 4 a "disruptive" chip? Hardly, but it makes Intel a lot of money! Is the Opteron more disruptive? Probably, but is AMD rolling in dough? Nope. Going back in time, was the 8086 more disruptive than the Motorola 68000? Nope. Who won that war? Intel. How? Crush, a marketing and sales program. Is this an example of "disruptive" technology? People continue to fall for these fad theories which simply don't track back to events as they actually occurred.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent analysis
Review: Christensen analysis is perfect insofar as its views of disruptive technologies are concerned. I wonder what is the cost analysis of disruptive technologies deployed near or after its life cycle is exhausted. --Andre
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Summary: Managing Growth
Review: Christensen and Raynor argue that growth is not only to be found in sustaining innovation strategies (i.e. incremental improvements made to existing products for a firm's current most profitable customers); but also through disruptive innovation strategies (i.e. seeking out ways of developing, often simpler products targeted at over-served customers, non-users, or both). Christensen and Raynor stress that the challenges facing many CEOs today are managing the two types of innovation strategy simultaneously within the same firm; and being able to resist the forces such as resource allocation criteria that force companies to maintain sustaining innovation strategies in industries that may be displaying signs of imminent disruption. This book is excellent if you wish to understand the forces that can drive or hinder a firm's growth with numerous real-life examples throughout the text.
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Summary: Another Essential Read
Review: Clayton Christensen has done it again - another insightful book on the fundamental issue facing corporations today. It should take its place on your bookshelf with the other essential reads on this subject - Christensen's first book "The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail", Reid Watts' "The Slingshot Syndrome: Why America's Leading Technology Firms Fail at Innovation", and Richard Foster's "Creative Destruction: Why Companies That Are Built to Last Underperform the Market--And How to Successfully Transform Them".
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Summary: Recommended reading for entrepreneurs and corporate managers
Review: Collaboratively written by Clayton M. Christensen (Robert & Jane Cizik Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School) and Michael E. Raynor (Director, Deloitte Research - Deloitte & Touche and Deloitte Consulting), and The Innovator's Solution: Creating And Sustaining Successful Growth is an informed and informative business guide to creating sustained growth and success. Individual chapters cogently address a variety of relevant concerns, including how to avoid commoditization or disruptive growth, creating products that customers want to buy, distinguishing between "good money" and "bad money", and more. The Innovator's Solution is especially recommended reading for entrepreneurs and corporate managers charged with the responsibility of enhancing their company's success and growth within a local, regional, or multinational marketplace.
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Summary: Even better than _Dilema_, provides a framework for growth
Review: Even software developers should read this book; much like the better books on Agile methodologies, the major contribution is a framework for finding the right kinds of processes for the particular situation that your product and market are in. Naturally, it's also filled with a ton of business information relevant for anybody who cares about the bottom line, but I particularly enjoyed that the text remained a readable set of strategies while still feeling like all sides of the arguments had been thoroughly researched and referenced. Most research paper writers would do well to read this book just to get a feeling for their approach. The only negative comment I have is around the lack of advice for folks who are running successful sustaining products so that they can assess competition -- it's hard to differentiate crackpot ideas from real threats to the business model, and reacting to every single idea with a competitive solution isn't practical.
Rating: 
Summary: Christensen's Dilemma
Review: Funny, the author faces the same dilemma as his innovators!! Isn't it about time Christensen innovates around the next "disruptive" management fad?
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Summary: Every Page Gave Me a New Idea
Review: Great combination of "egg head" business theory and practical techniques. If you're in the technology world your head will spin with all the new ideas this book will generate.
Rating: 
Summary: A dilemma with a solution?
Review: I expected Innovator's Solution to provide a resolution to the Innovator's Dilemma-until I realized dilemmas have no satisfactory solution. Innovator's Solution provides common-sense strategies for companies to follow in order to avoid getting blindsided by disruptive innovations--innovate and cannibalize your businesses-but lacks advice on how to avoid being out innovated. Christensen outlines the Dilemma again in this book, presenting the concepts of disruptive and sustaining innovation, and why large companies consistently struggle with disruptive innovation. He does present some tactics for large companies, such as investing in a venture capital fund. This provides companies with invaluable information about the future in their market and provides an opportunity to identify disruptive technologies early on. Like many technology books, Innovator's Solution, stretches to make its argument without the aid of quantitative research. Nevertheless, this book is well suited for managers wanting to understand the Dilemma and began putting the theory into practice. I gave this book 4-stars because it is insightful and very well written. While no golden solution is presented, Christensen outlines several strategies and tactics for addressing the dilemma. Certainly many books will follow by other authors.
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