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The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth

The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth

The Growth Paradox

At best one company in ten is able to sustain profitable growth. Yet capital markets demand that all companies seek it relentlessly and mercilessly punish those who fail. Why is consistent, persistent growth so difficult to achieve? Surprisingly, its not for lack of great ideas or capable managers, nor is it because customers are too fickle or innovation too unpredictable. Innovation fails, say Clayton M. Christensen and Michael E. Raynor, because organizations unwittingly strip the disruptive potential from new ideas before they ever see the light of day.

In his worldwide bestseller The Innovators Dilemma, Christensen explained how industry leaders get blindsided by disruptive innovations precisely because they focus too closely on their most profitable customers and businesses. The Innovators Solution shows how companies get to the other side of this dilemma, creating disruptions rather than being destroyed by them.

Drawing on years of in-depth research and illustrated by company examples across many industries, Christensen and Raynor argue that innovation can be a predictable process that delivers sustainable, profitable growth. They identify the forces that cause managers to make bad decisions as they package and shape new ideasand offer new frameworks to help managers create the right conditions, at the right time, for a disruption to succeed. The Innovators Solution addresses a wide range of issues, including:

How can we tell if an idea has disruptive potential?
Which competitive situations favor incumbents, and which favor entrants?
Which customer segments are primed to embrace a new offering?
Which activities should we outsource, and which should we keep in-house?
How should we structure and fund a new venture?
How do we choose the right managers to lead it?
How can we position ourselves where profits will be made in the future?

Revealing counterintuitive insights that will change your perspective on innovation forever, this landmark book shows how to create a disruptive growth engine that fuels ongoing success.

The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth

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Book Info

Authors: Clayton M. Christensen, Michael E. Raynor
Binding: Hardcover; 288 pages
Publication Date: 12/11/08
Publisher: Harvard Business Press
ISBN: 1578518520
Bookhuddle Average Rating: (5.0)
Amazon.com^® Average Rating: (4.5)

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Reviews

Number of Reviews:1, Bookhuddle Average Rating:

(5.0)

D@Bookhuddle

(5) A must-read for business decision makers

This is a follow up to "The Innovator's Dilemma" and it is a very informative and insightful book. This is such a well research, thought out, and written book on disruptive innovation with the purpose of providing a set of theories that can guid managers who need to grow new businesses. I highly recommend these books to any business decision maker.

Number of Reviews: 55, Amazon.com^® Average Rating:

(4.5)

(5) Innovator's Solution Review

This is another Masterpiece from Clayton Christensen, one of the acknowledged opinion leader on Innovation. This 2nd book is a MUST READ for those who have read his first book, "Innovator's Dilemma". This 2nd book provides several good case studies and information on how business growth can be and should be sustained and how to create the necessary growth potential. Once you are done with this book, continue to to read on another of Clayton's book known as Seeing What's Next. Steven Lim (RSTN) Singapore.

(4) Innovators Solution Book

It took awhile for the book to get here, but it arrived in good condition. I would use this supplier again.

(5) Fascinating book that every product marketing professional should read

This is turning common marketing and product development wisdom on its head. The basic idea is that you should not follow the masses, go with the flow or to look at previous successes to define your future products and services. Instead look at how people use products and services in their every day life and develop something that will do it better (cheaper, faster, more pleasant).

I loved the airport example about the smart phone...for years we're sold that we need to bring all the office applications onto the berries and PDAs (think Word, Excel, PowerPoint)...your office away from office for all these road warriors. Well it turns out, people don't really care to do office work while on the road. When they have 5-10 minutes to kill at the airport people (when not talking on the phone) like to read the paper, play games, browse through magazines, check sports and stocks online and watch TV. So your competition is not the desktop applications but the newspapers, TV and the entertainment. Voila, need to figure out how to bring that onto the berries/PDA instead of how to cram rich SW apps on the screen.

Another great example was the smoothie cafe. The owners tried all the usual marketing techniques (discounts, different flavors, names) to increase sales to no success. Then they analyzed for a whole week how people use their product. They find out in the morning most people bought a smoothie as a better on-the-go breakfast alternative (coffee was not fulfilling, bananas were messy, doughnuts were less healthy, sandwiches hard to maneuver while driving etc). In the afternoon moms with kids were most of the customers. They bought a smoothie to give a healthier, more fulfilling and cheaper snack to the kids. So the owners adjusted the product to these 2 main uses instead of one universal change across the board.

The book teaches you a new way to look at competition and what you need to innovate against:

Stop looking at your direct competitors to think about innovation (if we had that feature as they did, if we had more widgets, more colors, more sizes...) instead ask yourself if people are not buying this kind of product / service, then what are they doing today to fulfill the need? And so that is your real competition. Sometimes they do nothing in which case you have a virgin territory to explore.

The book warns the change is not easy and in fact is susceptible to lot of push back. There are suggestions and practical examples on how to start implementing this new thinking in the organization.

If anything the book it's a very refreshing look on the strategic planning required to building new products and services. Definitely a great discussion point.

Product Description

In the worldwide bestseller The Innovator's Dilemma, Clayton M. Christensen exposed a crushing paradox behind the failure of many industry leaders. By doing what good companies were supposed to do-focus on pleasing their most profitable customers-leaders were paving the way for their own demise. How? By ignoring "disruptive technologies"-new, cheaper innovations that initially target small customer segments but evolve to displace the reigning product.

Now, Christensen and coauthor Michael E. Raynor cut the Gordian knot of the "innovator's dilemma" with The Innovator's Solution. This groundbreaking book reveals that innovation is not as unpredictable as most managers have come to believe. While the outcomes of past innovations seem random, the process by which innovations are packaged and shaped within companies is very predictable. By understanding and managing the forces that influence this process, companies can shape high-octane business plans that create truly disruptive growth.

Drawing on years of in-depth research and using new theories tested in hundreds of companies across many industries, the authors identify the processes that create successful innovations, and show managers how to tailor their strategies to the changing circumstances of a dynamic world.

Comprehensive yet practical, The Innovator's Solution is an actionable prescription for innovation-driven, profitable growth.

"A good business book makes managers stop and think. A great business book teaches managers how to stop and think. This is a great book. It is hard to imagine an executive team that would not benefit from devoting an entire day to discussing it."

-Geoffrey Moore, Chairman and Founder, TCG Advisors, and author, Crossing the Chasm and Living on the Fault Line

"In The Innovator's Solution, Christensen and Raynor address the holy grail of all organizations: how to generate growth and sustain it over long periods. Avoiding the temptation to provide simplistic formulas, they guide the reader through carefully constructed frameworks that teach how to think about the issues that limit-and provide-growth to organizations."

-Dr. Andrew S. Grove, Chairman of the Board, Intel

"Christensen and Raynor have done a superb job of creating a framework for helping to understand the industry dynamics and for planning your own growth alternatives."

-Pekka Ala-Pietilä, President, Nokia Corporation

"Singapore, as a small nation, needs to be innovative and sensitive to disruptive changes more than other countries. Christensen and Raynor have provided an excellent framework to reduce the randomness of the innovation process. This framework will help in our effort to nurture an environment conducive for enterprises to create and capitalize on disruptive innovations."

-Teo Ming Kian, Chairman, Singapore Economic Development Board

"The Innovator's Solution goes directly to the heart of why large companies have failed to sustain innovation. Christensen and Raynor have a deep insight into the challenges that innovative companies face, and they propose practical, realistic solutions to the dilemmas of innovation. This book will be extremely useful to all managers who are committed to using innovation to sustain their growth."

-Bill George, former Chairman and CEO, Medtronic, Inc.

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