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 enlarge | Author: Clayton M. Christensen
Publisher: Collins Business
Category: Book
List Price: $17.95
Buy Used: $2.45
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Rating:  160 reviews
Sales Rank: 3955
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.3 x 0.9
ISBN: 0060521996
Dewey Decimal Number: 658
EAN: 9780060521998
ASIN: 0060521996
Publication Date: January 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Softcover. Stickers on back cover. Has heavy highlighting and some underlining. Some cover wear. Ships the next business day, with tracking and delivery confirmation sent to your email.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Mind-Expanding August 31, 2006
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
This is one of the best -- and scariest -- business books I've ever read. Christensen clearly illustrates why many of the 'tried and true' formulas really don't work. His research is compelling and is presented clearly enough for non-technical readers. I can't recommend this book highly enough!
Counterintuitive, well-supported, and powerful August 14, 2006
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This text excels on several levels: It is very readable, and tells a story which is understandable and compelling even at a cursory pace. For the motivated reader, digging deeper, especially spending time on the introduction and each chapter's endnotes, there is a huge amount of data and insight into that data that is well-structured for assimilation. Finally, the theories presented, once understood, become both a lens for interpreting past and current market dynamics, and set the stage for deployable actions in a number of industries.
 It must have been mistaken identitiy... August 6, 2006
4 out of 9 found this review helpful
During fourth of july vacation, I had a chsance to see an old college friend, who is a vice president for a large computer hard drive firm... he was showing offf his new Toyota hybrid when we began talking about the market forces, which interfered with large companies responding to the emerging needs and changes in the marketplace.
I was fascinated as he explained to me the difficulty of an older company attempting to incorporate new technologies, while maintaining a profit margin necessary to please investors. It was during this explanation, He recommended "The Inovator's Dilemma". All I can say is that his verbal synopsis was far m ore interesting than this dry two-hour lecture on CD. I can only surmize that there must be another book by the same name!
Could have been 4 bullets on a PowerPoint slide July 26, 2006
6 out of 10 found this review helpful
After slogging all the way through this book, I came to Amazon, expecting to see a low rating. I am surprised to see that it has 4.5 stars (as of when I'm writing this review) and a lot of positive comments.
On the plus side, the author did take some interesting ideas and combine them in a way that makes sense. I don't mind the hours I spent reading this book because at least it made me think about a couple of things I hadn't realized before.
But on the other hand... there are really only a few important concepts in this book, and you can see what they are by reading a couple of the longer reviews here (like Coert Visser's or the one from "Dr. Professor Hossein Arsham." There's no need to read the whole thing unless you want to hear those same concepts explained over and over again.
How to Leverage "The Innovator's Dilemma" in Your Small Software Company July 6, 2006
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.
Agree? Disagree? Comment and let me know.
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