|
| 
 enlarge | Author: Clayton M. Christensen
Publisher: Collins Business
Category: Book
List Price: $17.95
Buy Used: $2.45
You Save: $15.50 (86%)
New (37) Used (62) from $2.45
Rating:  160 reviews
Sales Rank: 4641
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
|
| Customer Reviews:
 For innovators and followers alike... June 30, 2006
No surprises here - this is an excellent book.
The subject matter is the essence of innovation (at least in the Western world), as long as it is not for the sake of innovation but for the purposes of commercialization. Concepts like leadership vs. followership, disruptive technologies, S-curves and value networks, set a framework for complex analysis of entire industries.
Much of the discussion is fairly straightforward: the need to match resource allocation to the nature of the innovations, and the gap created by the rates of change of technology and its needs, for instance. When coupled with powerful concepts like the reasons behind organizations' failure to attend to disruptive innovations, and the fallacies loyalty to customers bring, the pages read like a treatise on what make some companies great or lousy innovators.
The only criticism I could draw is some repetiveness - but I would not hold that against the author: the underlying themes are too closely interconnected.
Potential limitations of what make a firm' sussessful April 28, 2006
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Big firms are often beaten by new companies riding on the wave of new technology (referred as disruptive technology) than the existing competitors banking on incremental improvements in sustaining technologies. Why this happens and how can large organizations be made more capable of identifying and leveraging disruptive technologies are the two key challenges that the author, a research fellow from Harvard aims to address in part one and two of this book. Author uses insights from the detailed analysis of the hard disk drive industry, and also examples from the computers, retail, pharamaceutical and automobile industries.
The key reason for the great company's inability to identify, develop and leverage disruptive technologies lies in its decision making mechanism. Managers in successful companies focus on achieving the organizational growth and profitability needs through working better on satisfying the needs of existing important customers through improvement in existing technologies, making more efficient use of resources and designing and fine-tuning processes to make them more suitable to address repetitive tasks in most cost effective manner. In such a scenario, managers would view every technology through the prism of its relevance to existing customer needs and its ability to satisfy organizational growth and profitability requirements. The disruptive technologies which may have strengths in functionalities not valued higher by the existing customers, or may have initially smaller profit margins and market size tend to get ignored or dismissed by the Managers of successful firms in a very rational financial decision making process. These disruptive technologies often get attention, focus and ownership from start-ups or smaller forms and with time grow enough to challenge the mainstream incumbent firms. Quite often, it becomes too late for the big firms to respond to the threat then.
So, what is the way out? Here author proposes a framework for analyzing the capabilities of organization to work on any disruptive technology. Organization can be viewed as comprising Resources (people, technology, products, equipment etc.), Processes (mainly organizational processes of coordination, integration, communication and decision making) and values (criteria used to make selection among choices). Big firms are able to adopt and ;leverage sustaining technological developments more effectively than disruptive ones as the sustaining technologies exhibit greater for towards prevailing organizational RPV profile. Disruptive technologies would conflict with mainstream values (say profitability hurdle rate) and may not get necessary attention, support or resources.
There are three options available with big firms, try create isolated inlands working on disruptive technologies within the existing firm(with limited chances of success), wait and watch and buy smaller firms as the disruptive technology start showing promise (at higher cost and may not be available as well) or create (spinout or acquire) smaller firm to work on opportunity. Author tends to support the last option.
"When a threatening disruptive technology requires a different cost structure in order to be profitable and competitive, or when the current size of the opportunity is insignificant relative to the growth needs of the mainstream organization, then and only then is a spin out organization a required part of the solution". Match the size of the organization to the size of the market- so that everyone views the endeavor as crucial to the growth and profitability of the organization. Johnson and Johnson used this strategy very effectively to launch products if disruptive technologies (say disposable contact lens, endoscopic surgical equipment) through very small companies acquired for this purpose.
Besides the RPV framework to help organization address disruptive technological opportunities, author also presents certain principles in dealing with disruptive innovations, such as "markets that don't exist can not be analyzed".
This book is both thought provoking and resourceful. It not only sensitizes to the limitations of traditional decision making process in addressing disruptive technological interventions but also provides some preliminary guidelines/ framework on how to overcome these limitations.
Outstanding theoretical knowledge February 28, 2006
1 out of 4 found this review helpful
One of the best sources of knowledge suitable for all managers involved in today's business environment.
Among the creme of the creme of business books October 15, 2005
0 out of 7 found this review helpful
This is one of the most insightful books I've ever come across. The author is simply a genious. Embracing the principles of this book may be the difference between developing a successful business or not.
 Innovator's Dilemma, Digital Era's Dillema September 23, 2005
5 out of 9 found this review helpful
The American dream has a new name: e-business. But the realities of Internet era business are harsh and unique: a company who runs a-business could not only rely on its IT strategy, but still strongly should keep traditional skills just like management, marketing, promotion, customer relationship, etc.
Please don't simply consider that to run a successful e-business company you just simply need to hire IT expert, but also other experts.
Digital era is just a medium not a tool or sophisticated instrument which can lead you to your new American dream, the world dream, or whatever. The Innovator's Dilemma gave us a good example how to conquer the new era....
|
|
|
The Outpost Network | |
