Christensen Clayton. The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

3d ed. — Harvard Business Review Press, 2013. — 256 p. — (Management of innovation and change) — ISBN: 9780875845852, 142219602XClayton M. Christensen is the Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. In addition to his most recent book, Competing Against Luck, he is the author of nine books, including several New York Times bestsellers — The Innovator's Dilemma, The Innovator's Solution, Disrupting Class, and and most recently How Will You Measure Your Life?. Christensen is the co-founder of Innosight, a growth-strategy consultancy; Rose Park Advisors, an investment firm; and the Christensen Institute, a non-profit think tank. In 2011 and 2013, he was named the world’s most influential business thinker by Thinkers50.The Innovator’s Dilemma is an interesting work written by Clayton M. Christensen in 1997. The book seeks to explain why certain businesses are successful in their ventures and why other firms fail in response to new technologies. Christensen tries to explain throughout the book why some firms, when new technologies enter the market, fail either because they adapt the new technology or not. The author initially believes that new technologies are constantly emerging and all businesses must continually adapt to stay relevant. However, this proves to be false as in his studies not all firms that ignored the new technology failed while not all firms that adapted the new technology succeeded. This is the fundamental dilemma in the book, and Christensen’s main purpose is to figure out a recipe for managers to follow to stay successful when disruptive technologies enter the market. Most of the book revolves around the study of the disk drive market since they were first developed in the 1950’s. The disk drive industry was important because technology was rapidly advancing and smaller drives were being released within a few years of each other. Many of the established firms often chose not to invest in the next smaller disk drive because they did not have enough memory to meet their standards. However, emerging firms would find new markets for the use of smaller drives and also find ways to make them more powerful, eventually drive the existing firms out of business. Christensen eventually concludes that successful businesses often collapse, despite having good managers, because they fail to find the new markets for disruptive technologies while instead supplying current customers with what they currently need.Why great companies can fail
How Can Great Firms Fail? Insights from the Hard Disk Drive Industry
Value Networks and the Impetus to Innovate
Disruptive Technological Change in the Mechanical Excavator Industry
What Goes Up, Can’t Go Down
Managing disruptive technological change
Give Responsibility for Disruptive Technologies to Organizations Whose Customers Need Them
Match the Size of the Organization to the Size of the Market
Discovering New and Emerging Markets
How to Appraise Your Organization’s Capabilities and Disabilities
Performance Provided, Market Demand, and the Product Life Cycle
Managing Disruptive Technological Change: A Case Study
The Dilemmas of Innovation: A Summary
The Innovator’s Dilemma Book Group Guide
About the Author