The Innovator's Dilemma

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The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail
The Innovator's Dilemma.jpg
Author Clayton Christensen
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
GenreBusiness theory
PublisherHarvard Business Review Press; 1st edition (May 1, 1997)
Publication date
1997
ISBN 0875845851
Followed byThe Innovator's Solution 

The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail, first published in 1997, is the best-known work of the Harvard professor and businessman Clayton Christensen. It expands on the concept of disruptive technologies, a term he coined in a 1995 article "Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave". [1] It describes how large incumbent companies lose market share by listening to their customers and providing what appears to be the highest-value products, but new companies that serve low-value customers with poorly developed technology can improve that technology incrementally until it is good enough to quickly take market share from established business. Christensen recommends that large companies maintain small, nimble divisions that attempt to replicate this phenomenon internally to avoid being blindsided and overtaken by startup competitors.

Contents

Subject matter

Clayton Christensen demonstrates how successful, outstanding companies can do everything "right" and still lose their market leadership – or even fail – as new, unexpected competitors rise and take over the market. There are two key parts to this dilemma.

  1. Value to innovation is an S-curve: Improving a product takes time and many iterations. The first of these iterations provide minimal value to the customer but in time the base is created and the value increases exponentially. Once the base is created then each iteration is dramatically better than the last. At some point the most valuable improvements are complete and the value per iteration is minimal again. So in the middle is the most value, at the beginning and end the value is minimal.
  2. Incumbent sized deals: The incumbent has the luxury of a huge customer set but high expectations of yearly sales. New entry next generation products find niches away from the incumbent customer set to build the new product. The new entry companies do not require the yearly sales of the incumbent and thus have more time to focus and innovate on this smaller venture.

For this reason, the next generation product is not being built for the incumbent's customer set and this large customer set is not interested in the new innovation and keeps demanding more innovation with the incumbent product. Unfortunately, this incumbent innovation is limited to the overall value of the product as it is at the latter end of the S-curve. Meanwhile, the new entrant is deep into the S-curve and providing significant value to the new product. By the time the new product becomes interesting to the incumbent's customers it is too late for the incumbent to react to the new product. At this point it is too late for the incumbent to keep up with the new entrant's rate of improvement, which by then is on the near-vertical portion of its S-curve trajectory.

Through this compelling multi-industry study, Christensen introduces his seminal theory of "disruptive innovation" that has changed the way managers and CEOs around the world think about innovation.

Christensen then argues that the following are common principles that incumbents must address:

He also argues the following strategies assist incumbents in succeeding against the disruptive technology:

Reception

Shortly after the release of the book, it received the Global Business Book Award as the best business book of the year (1997). [3] The Economist also named it as one of the six most important books about business ever written". [4]

Impact on business world

Christensen at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in 2013 Clayton Christensen World Economic Forum 2013.jpg
Christensen at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in 2013

The term disruptive technologies was first described in depth with this book by Christensen; but the term was later changed to disruptive innovation in a later book (The Innovator's Solution). A disruptive innovation is an innovation that creates a new market and value network that will eventually disrupt an already existing market and replace an existing product.

Recent work

Since the book was published, various articles have been written, both critiquing and supporting Clayton Christensen's work.

The Innovator's Dilemma proved popular; not only was it reprinted, [5] but a follow-up book entitled The Innovator's Solution was published. [6] His books Disrupting Class [7] about education and The Innovator's Prescription [8] about health care both utilize ideas from The Innovator's Dilemma.

An empirical study replicated the Innovator's Dilemma's main prediction that incumbents innovate less than entrants in a study of the hard disk industry. It found the main reason for the comparable lack of innovation by incumbents lies in the reduced incentives to innovate due to product cannibalization. [9]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Disruptive innovation</span> Technological change

In business theory, disruptive innovation is innovation that creates a new market and value network or enters at the bottom of an existing market and eventually displaces established market-leading firms, products, and alliances. The term, "disruptive innovation" was popularized by the American academic Clayton Christensen and his collaborators beginning in 1995,, but the concept had been previously described in Richard N. Foster's book "Innovation: The Attacker's Advantage" and in the paper Strategic Responses to Technological Threats.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Innovation</span> Practical implementation of improvements

Innovation is the practical implementation of ideas that result in the introduction of new goods or services or improvement in offering goods or services. ISO TC 279 in the standard ISO 56000:2020 defines innovation as "a new or changed entity realizing or redistributing value". Others have different definitions; a common element in the definitions is a focus on newness, improvement, and spread of ideas or technologies.

In business and engineering, product development or new product development covers the complete process of bringing a new product to market, renewing an existing product or introducing a product in a new market. A central aspect of NPD is product design, along with various business considerations. New product development is described broadly as the transformation of a market opportunity into a product available for sale. The products developed by an organisation provide the means for it to generate income. For many technology-intensive firms their approach is based on exploiting technological innovation in a rapidly changing market.

In theories of competition in economics, a barrier to entry, or an economic barrier to entry, is a fixed cost that must be incurred by a new entrant, regardless of production or sales activities, into a market that incumbents do not have or have not had to incur. Because barriers to entry protect incumbent firms and restrict competition in a market, they can contribute to distortionary prices and are therefore most important when discussing antitrust policy. Barriers to entry often cause or aid the existence of monopolies and oligopolies, or give companies market power. Barriers of entry also have an importance in industries. First of all it is important to identify that some exist naturally, such as brand loyalty. Governments can also create barriers to entry to meet consumer protection laws, protecting the public. In other cases it can also be due to inherent scarcity of public resources needed to enter a market.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Clayton Christensen</span> American academic and business consultant (1952–2020)

Clayton Magleby Christensen was an American academic and business consultant who developed the theory of "disruptive innovation", which has been called the most influential business idea of the early 21st century. Christensen introduced "disruption" in his 1997 book The Innovator's Dilemma, and it led The Economist to term him "the most influential management thinker of his time." He served as the Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School (HBS), and was also a leader and writer in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. One of the founders of the Jobs to Be Done development methodology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cash cow</span> Business jargon

A cash cow is product or service that generates significant revenue over a long period of time for the company that sells it. Revenue “milked” from cash cows is often used to subsidise less profitable parts of a business.

A value network is a graphical illustration of social and technical resources within/between organizations and how they are utilized. The nodes in a value network represent people or, more abstractly, roles. The nodes are connected by interactions that represent deliverables. These deliverables can be objects, knowledge or money. Value networks record interdependence. They account for the worth of products and services. Companies have both internal and external value networks.

The customer base is a group of customers who repeatedly purchase the goods or services of a business. These customers are a main source of revenue for a company. The customer base may be considered a business's target market, where customer behaviors are well understood through market research or past experience. Relying on a customer base can make growth and innovation difficult.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Technology adoption life cycle</span> Sociological model

The technology adoption lifecycle is a sociological model that describes the adoption or acceptance of a new product or innovation, according to the demographic and psychological characteristics of defined adopter groups. The process of adoption over time is typically illustrated as a classical normal distribution or "bell curve". The model indicates that the first group of people to use a new product is called "innovators", followed by "early adopters". Next come the early majority and late majority, and the last group to eventually adopt a product are called "Laggards" or "phobics." For example, a phobic may only use a cloud service when it is the only remaining method of performing a required task, but the phobic may not have an in-depth technical knowledge of how to use the service.

Michael E. Raynor is a Canadian writer, director at Deloitte Services LP, and an expert on business management practices.

Innovation management is a combination of the management of innovation processes, and change management. It refers to product, business process, marketing and organizational innovation. Innovation management is the subject of ISO 56000 series standards being developed by ISO TC 279.

The innovation butterfly is a metaphor that describes how seemingly minor perturbations to project plans in a system connecting markets, demand, product features, and a firm's capabilities can steer the project, or an entire portfolio of projects, down an irreversible path in terms of technology and market evolution.

Mark W. Johnson is co-founder and senior partner at Innosight, a growth strategy consulting firm, which he co-founded with Clayton Christensen in 2000.

Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI) is a strategy and innovation process developed by Anthony W. Ulwick. It is built around the theory that people buy products and services to get jobs done. As people complete these jobs, they have certain measurable outcomes that they are attempting to achieve. It links a company's value creation activities to customer-defined metrics.

Innosight is a strategy consultancy within Huron Consulting Group, advising enterprises on business strategy. Innosight was founded in 2000 by Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen and senior partner Mark W. Johnson. Innosight uses methods based on the concept of disruptive innovation, a theory defined by Christensen in his book The Innovator's Dilemma. The company headquarters is located in Lexington, MA, with additional offices in Singapore and Switzerland. Scott D. Anthony is the firm's managing partner.

Scott D. Anthony is an author and senior partner at growth strategy consulting firm Innosight.

Creative disruption was introduced in 1992 by TBWA's chairman Jean-Marie Dru. It refers to a radical change in a marketplace brought about by the overturning of existing conventions.

Anthony (Tony) W. Ulwick is the founder and chief executive officer of Strategyn, LLC. an innovation consulting firm based in San Francisco. He is the creator of Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Management system (open source)</span>

Management System (Open Source) is a socio-technical system that leverages the cumulative knowledge of management practitioners and evidenced based research from the past 130 years. The system was developed by DoD components in partnership with industry experts and academic researchers and builds off of the US Department of Wars version 1.0 open source management system - Training Within Industry.

Efosa Ojomo is a Nigerian author, researcher and speaker. He leads the Global Prosperity research group at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, a think tank based in Boston and Silicon Valley and is a senior research fellow at the Harvard Business School. Efosa speaks regularly on innovation and has presented his work at TED, the Aspen Ideas Festival, the World Bank, Harvard, Yale, Oxford and at several other conferences and institutions. In January 2019, Efosa and Harvard Business School professor, Clayton Christensen published "The Prosperity Paradox: How Innovation Can Lift Nations Out of Poverty".

References

  1. Bower, Joseph L. & Christensen, Clayton M. (1995). However the concept of new technologies leading to wholesale economic change is not a new idea since Joseph Schumpeter adapted the idea of creative destruction from Karl Marx. Schumpeter (1949) in one of his examples used "the railroadization of the Middle West as it was initiated by the Illinois Central". He wrote, "The Illinois Central not only meant very good business whilst it was built and whilst new cities were built around it and land was cultivated, but it spelled the death sentence for the [old] agriculture of the West. "Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave" Harvard Business Review , January–February 1995.
  2. Christensen, Clayton M. (15 December 2015). The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. Harvard Business Review Press. ISBN   9781633691797 . Retrieved 19 January 2018 via Google Books.
  3. Innosight,(2014). Clayton Christensen-Innosight Co-founder. [online] Available at: http://www.innosight.com/about-us/clayton-christensen.cfm [Accessed 15 Oct. 2014].
  4. "Aiming high", Jun 30th 2011. http://www.economist.com/node/18894875
  5. Christensen, Clayton (2011). The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business. HarperBusiness. pp.  336. ISBN   978-0062060242.
  6. Christensen, Clayton (2003). The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth . Harvard Business School Press. ISBN   1578518520.
  7. Christensen, Clayton; Johnson, Curtis; Horn, Michael (2010). Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns (2 ed.). p. 272. ISBN   9780071749107.
  8. Christensen, Clayton; Grossman, Jerome H.; Hwang, Jason (2008). The Innovator's Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care. McGraw-Hill. p. 496. ISBN   9780071592086.
  9. Igami, Mitsuru (June 2017). "Estimating the Innovator's Dilemma: Structural Analysis of Creative Destruction in the Hard Disk Drive Industry, 1981–1998". Journal of Political Economy. 125 (3): 798–847. doi:10.1086/691524. ISSN   0022-3808.

Further reading