One of the books that really broadens and deepens your understanding what are the rules of nature for sustaining versus disruptive innovations in business. Novadays many startups represents themselves as disruptive, this book provides great details what real attributes of disruptive inovations are. Good Book!

Fantastic ideas packaged into a rambling, stodgy text.

I am happy I read this one, which was recommended to me during an interview with a startup. It's interesting to think about how disruptors come to be, and why the biggest companies with the most resources have trouble identifying & then capitalizing in emerging markets. Small companies can prove technologies in smaller markets and then scale. Larger companies have immense difficulty going "downmarket." Christensen captures this dilemma well, the case-studies are astute, and additional commentary (on value networks, resources/processes/values framework, performance oversupply) are fascinating. Especially so as I went through this latest job search thinking critically about startups and their market potential.

However, like many business books it was far from succinct, which made reading a slog. The 230 pages could have been done in ~120. Not only did it feel like I read the same paragraph many times over, sometimes across chapters and even back-to-back, but I also took major issue with the verbosity. Thinking about how many passages could have been accomplished with far fewer sentences or words ended up being a huge distraction

I doubt I'll read any more of his books. Rather, a summary article should suffice.

very interesting approach on tackling disruptive innovation and breaking the typical business s curve, unfortunately my brain isnt big enough to understand all the charts and references to the disk drive industry

A short piece on how disruptive innovation fails to bloom in gigantic organizations, and how innovators might act around the "force of nature" of large corporations whose inertia is towards incremental increases on existing customers. The book describes managerial practices, minimum profit margins, and existing data handicapping larger corporations on making investments on risky ideas whose customers do not yet exist. At the same time, dislocation of small self-sufficient teams, cultivating of sub-companies with majority shares, and exemptions of some requirements for "innovation units" can drive disruptive innovation within large companies.

Extremely technical and academically sound advice on how to operate a business in an extremely fast changing environment.

Я дізналася про цю книгу завдяки пораді викладача. Очікування у мене були так собі, якщо чесно, чомусь мені здавалося, що в книзі буде багато зайвого.

Але невдовзі я була приємно здивована. Книга лаконічна, структурована, важка часом, але зрозуміла. Насправді, це, мабуть, найперша книга з економічної літератури в яку я справді закохалася.

Автор, в прямому сенсі, пояснює все на пальцях, щоб зрозумів будь-який читач. Тому якщо ви зацікавлені в економіці, інвестиційному житті величезних компаній, як малі компанії вбивають величезні — не проходьте повз цю книгу)

This is one of the best books on innovation in the last 20 years. I read it in 2000 and still refer to it. Christensen’s core insight/argument is that businesses fight shy of developing innovations that will 1: produce limited profits initially; 2: cannibalise core, high cashflow/profit lines. But that what look like niche technologies – Winchester drives, hydraulic backhoes, etc – improve in capability, reliability and reduce in price to the point that they entirely cannibalise the existing market, leaving the established players high and dry, with no new product lines. (In a way he is reposing the falling rate of profit thesis.) He suggests some rather less convincing solutions in the book, and expounded further in The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth. I would argue that Apple presents an interesting solution to this challenge, with its creation of new product lines that complement and build on – but, largely, don’t cannibalise – its existing product lines.

On my site

I've written before I'm not a big fan of many business books because many authors "intentionally or unintentionally, [attempt] to make [their] book some kind of new scriptural canon, demanding of our attention year after year." The Innovator's Dilemma is a different book altogether; it's MBA territory and not meant for readers who enjoy a quick but mostly superficial exploration at self-help techniques. Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma is a challenging and enlightening book, which purports to break new ground in the understanding of business and technology but also explores existing principles beneficial to all and not only the entrepreneur or senior manager.

My awareness of The Innovator's Dilemma came while reading the excellent biography Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. Isaacson wrote: ". . . Christensen was one of the world's most insightful business analysts, and Jobs was deeply influenced by his book The Innovator's Dilemma." I figured I should pay attention to this book so highly regarded by one of the most influential business leaders in recent memory. Christensen's book attempts to document and explain how disruptive technology differs from sustaining technologies within industries—all detailed and defined, of course—and how entire industries have been significantly changed and how seemingly successful companies have folded or been greatly reduced in capability and reach due to disruptive changes. That all sounds a bit esoteric, and in some ways it is without modest knowledge of businesses and organizations, but I found the information very interesting and useful.

Amazingly, I didn't find The Innovator's Dilemma to be redundant, as many business books are. It seemed that any time the book started to become too repetitious it would pivot to a new theory or model to continue explaining the phenomenon of disruptive technologies. Although I was able to follow with a modicum of confidence the main ideas and principles, I certainly had to slow down a few times, re-read a few sentences, and ponder over a few graphs for a bit longer than usual to truly understand what was being presented and discussed. In some cases, I'm still pondering. As mentioned previously, this is not an easy read. It will push you to dig deeper into seemingly straightforward business cases and consistently use your critical thinking skills.

Clayton Christensen offers something truly valuable and insightful with his book The Innovator's Dilemma. I don't expect to create any disruptive technologies or necessarily be in a senior management situation having to make organizational decisions to deal with one, but I feel much more educated regarding business, organizations, and the constant change that is pervasive through most industries.

On a side note, Clayton Christensen's TED talk, How Will You Measure Your Life?, is well worth listening to and provides an impetus to reflect and examine your life and ambitions.

http://thethousanderclub.blogspot.com/

As usual, Christensen has presented an effective framework for considering and handling a topic. Even though this was written in the late 1990s, the principles still hold true.

I have so many ideas for how to properly evaluate and maneuver legal innovations after reading this. It’s pivotal.

If you are sick of hearing cliches like - "The customer is always right", this book is for you. The author Clayton Christensen who is very well known for his research, takes examples of industries like disk drive, excavation and such to demonstrate how successful and innovative companies fail precisely because they listen to their customers. The author proves that getting customer feedback, tracking competition, allocating resources carefully, using tried-and-tested processes, all hallmarks of good management eventually kill the spirit of disruption. He also talks about how experts that try to predict disruptive technologies fail miserably. Successful companies are aware of disruptions and some of them do build disruptive products in parallel with existing ones, but because of small margins they get by selling disruptive products in insignificant markets, those products do not get the limelight resulting into companies missing their market share.

The dilemma that the author refers to is two-fold -
1. The value to innovation S-curve: Developing a product takes iterations. Early iterations provide less value but as product matures, the values raises exponentially. At some point, all valuable additions to the product are complete, and value per iteration goes down again. For this reason, customers of successful companies are not interested in new / disruptive products, instead they focus on innovating existing products. Newcomers on the other hand do not have this obligation, and they go deep into the S-curve, thereby providing great value to their customers.

2. Newbies vs. existing players expectations: Existing companies have to keep up with high expectations of their share holders while newcomers can pursue a small segment of the market. Newcomers do not have to satisfy their investors or increase sales. This allows them to focus on innovation.

This is a very insightful book and even if you are not into management, it is very useful. My only problem is the highly redundant and academic style of narration. Perhaps, the author could have made it friendlier for non-management folks, but a good read nevertheless!

This book had an interesting combination of attributes, where it was incredibly boring and repetitive, but also taught me a lot of interesting things and was super interesting to read 25 years into the future.
If I had to describe what I didn't like about this book, it reminded me of those "reading life hacks" you periodically see from self help gurus that give insane suggestions like "just read the first sentence of each paragraph" or "have your assistant summarize it for you". This book is so repetitive and weirdly written that those strategies probably would work. It also has that McKinsey (the author worked at BCG technically though there weirdly is a part of the book where he praises McKinsey) writing style that I find super unpleasant to read as somebody who doesn't really like management-y language at all.
However, this book also taught me a lot of interesting stuff and was cool from a historical perspective. For one, it was very surprising to me that this book was written in 1997 (by a guy from HBS and BCG), and already had a ton of Silicon Valley culture encoded into it. Even though I'm not particularly chauvinistic about the tech industry, I was not expecting to read a book written in 1997 by an aggressively not-tech person to encode so many Silicon Valley ideas in it.
The other "high level" thing that was interesting to me was how much the definition of "disruptive innovation" has been tortured since this book was released (as I understand it this book originated the term). This reminds me of something Michael Hobbes said on a podcast about how "nobody actually reads famous books". The notion of "disruption" in this book is much narrower than what people nowadays (hem hem ARKK) use it for. In particular, the current waves of crypto and electric cars really don't fit into the framework that well! As I have said in my reviews before, I'm quite skeptical of modern startup culture, and it was honestly refreshing to find out that "disruption" wasn't really a buzzword in this book and actually referred to something you could backup with data and a mental model that makes sense.
Lots of small things that I thought were cool in this book: the history of the hard drive industry (and an interesting justification of why to use it as a natural experiment), the history of the excavator industry (exciting for an inner 5 year old + how it aligned with the creation of suburbs in the 1960s) , how Honda invented dirtbikes and the history of the steel mill industry. One cool fact about steel mills that I liked was that apparently the cost of a new ore-smelting steel mill in ~1990 dollars was 6 billion? I've only ever heard those levels of capital expenditure described for chip fabs, so it never occurred to me that other infrastructure costs that much. Also, he seems to sort of circuitously describe the idea of "pivots" found in "The Lean Startup" way before the book.
As I mentioned, I liked that the arguments about moves upmarket/downmarket and organizational incentives actually made sense.
The historical aspects of this were interesting too, 25 years later. He talks about SSDs like they are just around the corner, although it actually took another 10 years before they started being used anywhere, and probably 20 before they actually captured market share. He also talks about Seagate like they're a bunch of schmucks even though I think they're one of the only computer companies in the book that's currently successfully in business. The whole chapter about motorcycles reads very differently now that the industry seems to be in decline. I also really wonder what new trends there are in steel/excavators after reading the book.
One historical thought that this book made me have: so many of the tech giants seem to have such an unassailable/un-disruptable position now. When I look at the standard FAANG strategy of acquiring hot startups, it seems like they truly have internalized the lessons of this book and have learned to fight off disruption a lot better. On the other hand, seems like Tiktok is actually fits into the "disruptive" framework quite well.
The elephant in the room of interesting historical things in this book is the chapter at the end about electric cars. The author, in 1997, gives his idea for how to commercialize electric cars. He was wrong, though I don't think he is stupid. His suggestion was to basically start a company that makes smartcar/golf cart type electric cars for use cases where the range/other limitations aren't issues and then gradually grow the technology.
The actual trajectory of the electric car industry has been more like most of the companies waiting for a breakthrough, and (even though Tesla/BYD/Rivian seem to have taken hold), none of the establishment players got disrupted. Ultimately, the established car manufacturers just waited until electric cars were safe, while the new ones burned billions of dollars of startup capital instead of finding some small initialmarket. If I had to say, I think the reasons for this are that manufacturing cars is a humongous capital expenditure, and the "own a small market as a beachhead" strategy he describes doesn't work because it doesn't seem like that could raise enough capital to start building fully compliant cars. There just weren't such large niche markets for electric cars. If anything, the "beachhead market" was for people who wanted to look cool/techy/environmentally friendly. Interestingly, it seems like electric cars only really got competitive at like 250 miles of range, rather than the 125-150 quoted in the book. I think some combination of there not really being niches for electric cars in the market and governments/people wanting fully competitive electric cars has lead to the trajectory of the electric car industry in the last 10 years.
Anyway, to conclude, this book managed to pull of the unique feat of fascinating me/making me think while also making me bored a lot.

This was a fun read. The innovators dilemma, surprisingly infrequently defined in this book, arises by the fact that disruptive innovation, the most deadly form of competition for a technology business, occurs in the least valuable sectors of the market. Thus companies cannot rationally pursue it but will inevitably get eaten alive by it as history has shown many times over.

Since this books seems to be written for managers of successful technology companies, this is poised as a management dilemma. I was reading it from the eyes of an innovator and I may have called it the innovation paradox instead.

At first the innovators dilemma seems like it could have been a long article rather than a book. However it turns out that getting beaten over the head with so many real world examples is quite valuable and thought provoking. The author also does perhaps the best job of citing his sources that I have ever seen and the book is noteworthy for that alone.

It almost becomes a bit of a period piece as it constantly makes the heavily capitalistic assumption that the only rational business is one growing at the fastest possible rate. Perhaps if this wasn't true innovation would have a very different landscape. I believe if this book was written today, the author would at least question whether this entire ordeal of doing business in such a way is in fact, rational.

Chapter 10 was my favorite part as the author gives his thoughts on how innovation may occur in electric cars. Its thrilling to see some of his thoughts turn true and others miss the mark as the industry has grown monstrously since this was written.

The greatest part of this book is how it makes you feel like you are just on the cusp of innovation and revolution if only you would start small enough.