The Innovator's Dilemma

Customer Reviews:

Disruptive technologies create a threat to large companies

By Coert Visser "solutionfocusedchange.com" - November 13, 2001

This is a book is about successful, well-led companies -often market leaders- that carefully pay attention to what customers need and that invest heavily in new technologies, but still loose their market leadership suddenly. This can happen when disruptive technologies enter the stage. Most technologies improve the performance of existing products in relation to the criteria which existing customers have always used. These technologies are called sustaining technologies. Disruptive technologies do something different. They create an entirely new value proposition. They improve the performance of the product in relation to new performance criteria. Products which are based on disruptive technologies are often smaller, cheaper, simpler, and easier to use. However, the moment they are introduced, they can not at once compete against the traditional products and so they cannot directly reach a big market. Christensen researched how disruptive technologies have developed in the computer... read more

A new paradigm

By Duwayne Anderson - August 11, 1998

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... read more

Disruptive vs. Sustaining Technologies

By Jennifer Ryan - January 12, 2000

Christensen clearly presents the reality of how disruptive technologies affect organizations. He reviews the business perspectives of large firms vs. those of small firms, and their issues with disruptive and sustaining technologies, i.e., resources, profit margins, customers, etc. Christensen explains that what to us, from the point of 20/20 hindsight, may now seem like blatantly obvious organizational faux pas, at the time seemed like the correct path for the organization to follow. He also reviews companies that have been able to not only survive, but succeed with the emergence of disruptive technologies. Disruptive Technologies vs. Sustaining TechnologiesOne of the main reasons why great firms fail is that they attempt to market and manage disruptive technologies utilizing the same methodologies that are found to be successful for the management and marketing of sustaining technologies. These firms are essentially held captive by their customers, since this... read more