Name: The Innovator's Solution
ISBN: 9781578518524

The Innovator's Solution

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.

What Hacker News says

pchristensenMar 2025

You're not the only one that has had those kind of feelings, and I really relate to the movies you referenced.

Try to remember, AI is a tool, not a solution, and there will always be new problems. There's a strong case that unlike every other time people said that technology will kill all the jobs, this time it actually will. But a helpful framework comes from Clayton Christensen's Innovator's Solution (not the much more famous Innovator's Dilemma) - whereas a business has well defined needs that can be satisfied by improving products, customers (i.e. people) have ever evolving needs that will never be met. So while specific skills may lose value, there will always be a demand for the ability to recognize and provide value and solutions.

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btillyJun 2020

I am reminded of a quote from The Innovator's Solution about how to build a spinoff in a disruptive industry:

Dumb money is impatient for growth and patient for profit. Smart money is impatient for profit and patient for growth.

That book has a lot to say about the dynamics of why this is so. But the lesson is worth thinking about. If you want sustainable returns, focus on being profitable and let growth take care of itself.

However Venture Capital has a fundamental problem that leads to their being "dumb". It is in the interests of the people running the fund to get as much money in the fund as possible (so that they can get the management fees). But then they need to invest too much money in startups. Which forces those startups to search for big enough business opportunities to justify the investment. And if along the way they happen to find a smaller opportunity, they can't pursue it. Therefore they have to look for growth, growth, growth.

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erispoeSep 2017

> it’s incredible hard to “start small” because your being judged against all the incumbents

Then you're probably addressing the wrong market. I found _The Innovator's Solution_[1] by Clayton Christensen pretty useful to understand that. You want to address a market that is underserved or not served at all by the existing big players. Often, it's by providing a service that is much simpler, much less powerful, but cheaper and/or more accessible than the existing solutions.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Solution-Creating-Sustaini...

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paraschopraJan 2017

2016 was the year I ended up reading most books that I have ever read in any year of my life so far! These are the ones I liked the most:

1. The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World by David Deutsch. It makes a bold claim that we will always be at the beginning of the infinite progress that lies ahead. History has proven again and again that whenever people said all progress has been made, so much more progress unfolds. I liked this book so much that we gifted this book at my startup to the entire team of 170 people!

2. The Innovator's Solution by Clayton M. Christensen and Michael E. Raynor. This is a sequel to the popular Innovator's Dilemma book. I like the sequel much better because it tries to give solutions to the dilemma. The book packs tons of counter intuitive insights. Highly recommended.

3. The Big Picture by Sean Carrol. The best cosmology book I have read in a long while

4. First break all the rules. If you are a first time manager, I highly recommend reading this book.

5. Deep Work by Cal Newport. This book changed my working habits and life. I was constantly distracted before, and now I am able to focus a ton.

6. Feeling Good. This classic is again a must read. Even if you are not depressed, it will help build your mental immunity against future depression.

7. Our Mathematical Universe by Max Tegmark. A very interesting book that makes the claim that our universe is actually just mathematics. No physical reality exists because physics and mathematics are interchangeable.

There were many other interesting books I read (I read a total of 60 books in 2016!) For those who are interested, here's my entire list of books that I read in 2016: http://shelfjoy.com/paraschopra/books-ive-read-in-2016

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btillyApr 2016

The most important part of the article is easily missed unless you've read The Innovator's Solution. Which is the follow up book and spends a lot of time looking inside of organizations to see why it is so darned hard to catch the disruptive train.

A company with a profitable niche and a profitable technology will wind up with high internal costs. That's fine in their main business because they have a profit margin to play with. But it is surprisingly hard to trim back that "fat" to go after much lower margin revenue with a cheaper technology. (Fat is in quotes because it isn't really fat. It is necessary for the high margin business.) It is common to try, and to conclude that it is a failure.

That is why Intel made this mistake.

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calcsamOct 2015

In its early stages, every technology is vertically integrated, aka tightly coupled.

If you were to buy a minicomputer or mainframe in the 1970s, or a personal computer in the early-1980s, the same provider would make the hardware, peripherals, OS, applications, etc.

As the technology develops, that changes -- the PC market in the 1990s turned the hardware, peripherals into commodities. Until Apple's resurgence, it looked like the whole market outside of the OS would be commoditized.

With smartphoness in the late-2000s, it was a very similar story: tightly-integrated early phones, gradually maturing into more commoditized hardware, peripherals, and applications, while retaining a premium market segment (iOS) with tight vertical integration.

This pattern is fairly similar across industries, some good reading on the topic:

https://hbr.org/2009/12/vertical-integration-can-work/

Clayton Christiansen, "The Innovator's Solution", Chapter 6: "How to Avoid Commoditization"

Simon Wardley and "Wardley maps"; a good intro is here: http://www.slideshare.net/swardley/general-2013

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