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The Innovator's Dilemma, When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (平装)
by Clayton M. Christensen
| Category:
Strategy, Innovation, Change, Business |
| Market price: ¥ 208.00
MSL price:
¥ 158.00
[ Shop incentives ]
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| Stock:
In Stock |
MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
In-depth analysis, excellent examples, actionable recommendations, a great book about business strategies, must read for managers. |
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AllReviews |
1 2   | Total 2 pages 15 items |
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Michael Bloomberg (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-26 00:00>
Absolutely brilliant. Clayton Christensen provides an insightful analysis of changing technology and its importance to a company's future success. |
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Jon Hughes (Supply Management) (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-26 00:00>
This is a compelling argument, thoroughly researched and superbly written, which challenges conventional theory. |
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Martin Fakley (Information Access) (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-26 00:00>
I cannot recommend this book strongly enough - ignore it at your peril. |
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George Gilder (Gilder Technology Report), USA
<2006-12-26 00:00>
[A] masterpiece...The most profound and useful business book ever written about innovation. |
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Rich Karlgaard (Forbes) (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-26 00:00>
In a sea of mostly worthless business books, this is an upside surprise - sharply written and rigorous enough to be predictive. Christensen's thesis: Great companies blow it precisely because they do everything right. He explains why top companies that had listened hard to customers and invested like crazy in new technologies still lost their market leadership when confronted with disruptive changes in technology and market structure. Poor managers are not to blame. Nor are bureaucracy, late technology or tired executive blood. The culprits are size and a company's best customers....The Innovator's Dilemma could be the wake-up call you need. |
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Business Week (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-26 00:00>
A handbook for CEOs remaking their businesses for the Net. |
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Scott Meade (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-26 00:00>
Christensen's study of disruptive innovators and advice to companies positioned to become disruptive innovators provides encourgaging guidance to independent software vendors (ISVs). In "The Innovators Dilemma", Harvard professor Clayton M. Christensen studies several industries to discover why companies that are doing all the right things loose their leadership positions or fail altogether. Christensen's focus is on "disruptive technologies" and the innovators that create them and introduce them to the market.
Micro ISVs should understand Christensen's discovery of characteristics of disruptive technologies. The micro ISV model closely follows the descriptions of successful, disruptive innovators in The Innovator's Dilemma
Review these and see if your small software company has an opportunity to become a disruptor. (Note that Christensen uses the term "technology" not in the sense of "Information Technology" but as a general term meaning the state of any industry. His study covered industries as differing as excavation equipment, motorcycles, disk drives, and steel).
Characteristics of Disruptive Technologies
And Where Your ISV Fits
"1. The Weakness of Disruptive Technologies Are Their Strengths". Christensen profiles companies such as Conner Peripherals that created small disk drives. The established marketplace at the time did not value the limited storage capacity of the drives so Conner Peripherals created a market in portable computers. By seeking and encouraging a market that made physical size more important than storage capability, Conner Peripherals changed the basis of competition.
Christensen goes on to say though that the challenge is not one of technology. In the cases he studied, he found that firms with successful disruptive technologies won because of a marketing focus not at technology focus. In his words, they were able to "build or find a market where product competition occurred along dimensions that favored the disruptive attributes of the product."
"2. Disruptive Technologies are Typically Simpler, Cheaper, and More Reliable and Convenient than Established Technologies". Quoting: "Because established companies are so prone to push for high-performance, high-profit products and markets, they find it very difficult not to overload their first disruptive products with features and functionality." Christensen goes on to study the success that Intuit found with Quicken. Scott Cook, founder of Intuit, followed just this model when introducing Quicken as a simpler alternative to the complex accounting programs most individuals and small businesses had available.
These observations of successful innovators should be an encouraging guide to micro ISVs. You have the opportunity to turn our perceived weaknesses into strengths and to focus on being the simpler, cheaper and more reliable and convenient offering to take on competitors in your segment.
To lead your company there, Christensen discovered four "principles of disruptive technology".
Principles of Disruptive Technology
And How Your ISV Can Leverage These Principles
"1. Companies Depend on Customers and Investors for Resources" You must not be customer driven to a fault. This seemingly contrarian advice bears itself out in the study of several different industries. Most companies listen to their biggest customers and develop their products along the lines of what those customers say they want. These companies find themselves unable to respond to disruptive technologies or to think of a future beyond the customers' current self-expressed needs. Companies spend resources trying to please their current customers and loose sight of potential new markets and changes in what capabilities the market values and what capabilities are really leveraged vs. simply stated desires.
Your ISV is not constrained by large, mainstream customers - in fact you may not even have customers yet. Your ISV is not constrained by large institutional investors more concerned about this quarter's growth rate than establishing a foundation for the future.
To break this dependency on customers and investors for company direction, Christensen recommends managers form small, autonomous, breakaway teams that are not constrained by what their mainstream customers want. These small teams then find new markets and a new world of capability-value for which the larger organization is not aligned.
Your ISV is a small, autonomous team out of the box.
"2. Small Markets Don't Solve the Growth Needs of Large Companies". Your small ISV can be successful addressing new markets that are under the radar of large companies.
"3. Markets that Don't Exist Can't be Analyzed". Established companies have effective market research and planning organizations and processes. Yet these organizations and processes are not effective ways to discover new markets.
Christen presents the case study of Honda's entry into the American motorcycle market in the 50's and 60's. Honda found success discovering a small-bike (50cc) market that the big makers (Harley, BMW) did not pursue. By offering a reliable, fun product, Honda identified a market segment and a value proposition that other makers later tried to emulate. By then Honda had an established dealer network and low cost production capability while Harley dealers wanted to keep focus on high margin large bikes. While large bikes provided high margin, they turned out to produce low growth rates. The small bike market had a much larger growth rate.
Your small ISV can be much more effective at discovering new markets and taking advantage of their fast growth rates.
"4. An Organization's Capabilities Define its Disabilities". We touched on some of this earlier. Companies often become successful on the basis of their processes and values. By definition though, processes and values do not change rapidly so a company defines itself by these and also defines what it will or cannot do by these capabilities.
As a new ISV, you have the opportunity to create new capabilities. Ensure that your processes and values server your desired target or goal and do not unnecessarily constrain you from leveraging capabilities that you do have.
"5. Technology Supply May Not Equal Market Demand". Christensen presents examples of industries where technology capabilities exceed what the market really wants leaving a "vacuum" in the lower price points.
Your new ISV can fill this vacuum.
Summary
1. Study Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma for guidance on seeking opportunities and evaluating strengths of your new ISV.
2. Do not be sucked into competition based on length of product's feature-lists. The features that customers value change quickly. It is more important to be able to meet the most important features well than to have the absolute greatest number of features.
3. Discover and tackle the vacuums left by established competitors.
4. Prefer large growth rate opportunities to large margin opportunities. |
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Rolf Dobelli (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-26 00:00>
Professor Clayton M. Christensen's excellent book is a classic of strategy literature. The innovator's dilemma is that doing the right things can lead to failure. Sometimes it is wrong to listen to customers, invest in the highest return opportunities and do all of the things that made a successful company succeed. Clearly written, amply documented, provocative and challenging, this book is indispensable for anyone in business. If it has a shortcoming, it is that it focuses more on the dilemma than on resolving it and it does not offer specific remedial prescriptions. However, Christensen has authored or co-authored two other books that attempt to remedy that deficiency. We heartily recommend this book, which remains the leader of the three. It has the potential to change the way managers think about business - any business. |
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Michael Davis (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-26 00:00>
In this revolutionary bestseller, Harvard professor Clayton M. Christensen says outstanding companies can do everything right and still lose their market leadership, or worse, disappear completely. And he not only proves what he says; he tells others how to avoid a similar fate.
To be a successful entrepreneur you must be able to capitalize on change. "The Innovator's Dilemma" is all about dealing with change, from the incumbent's point of view. How valuable do you think it would be to understand how your larger competitors think? That's exactly what this book talks about.
Most large, established firms are inherently weak in one area - they cling to the status quo with a vengeance. While talk of innovation is commonplace, it is the attacker (entrepreneurs) who holds a definitive advantage. Without legacy systems and overbearing bureaucracy it is the entrepreneur who has the upper hand.
"The Innovator's Dilemma" consists of two major parts:
Part One: Why Great Companies Fail
Part Two: Managing Disruptive Change
This is one of the most insightful books on business that I have ever read. It explains a very important concept - how radically new (disruptive) technologies can overtake existing well-established (sustaining) technologies and in the process beat market leaders at their own game.
Large companies typically ignore small markets and instead look for growth in established markets. All too often executives of large companies are reluctant to take on challenges in small and unknown terrain since they are always trained to "think big" - which is good news for Aspiring Entrepreneurs.
Take heed, read this book and learn how to fully exploit disruptive technologies and become the next "great company." |
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An American reader (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-26 00:00>
A great book with some very insightful ideas. Prior to reading this book, the term "disruptive technology" was foreign to me. I always thought that the large company's misfortunes were largely an indication of how short-sided or greedy their management have become. The more I read, the faster my previous assumptions disappear. We have had many companies come out of no-where and become a technological sensation over night, with products that are destined to become main stream. I never viewed those innovations as disruptive technologies but rather as fresh approaches to the same problems that have existed for sometime, which may seem sound to some, but to others who were focused on that core of business, they will see how some new innovations may spell the death-sentence for some companies as well as retire the current de facto products that are in that void. Christensen also discusses how companies can survive disruptive technology attacks and benefit from them to maintain their active participation as well as leadership in their respective industry. Foresight and the courage to invest in those disruptive technologies is key to keep the core business balanced as well as staying in touch with the new competitors. |
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1 2 | Total 2 pages 15 items |
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