This is one of those times where I feel waaaayyy behind. Clayton Christensen published the original edition of The Innovator’s Dilemma in 1997, right as the tech/internet boom was in full roar. Of course, his research pre-dated that rush, and his timing just turned out to be wonderful for capturing a lot of attention. There were hundreds of new companies eager to claim the mantle of innovator. Similarly, there were thousands of existing companies struggling with their approach to the internet. I’ll bet various folks held up the arguments in this book — properly or otherwise — as support for their suggested course of action. I wonder how many were appropriate in their use of these thoughts? History has buried much of the evidence, I’m sure.
Late though I am, I’m glad I read this book. Christensen supports everything he writes, with examples from multiple industries. His deepest research pulls from the accelerated pace of the hard disk-drive manufacturers. I appreciated the technical hook. More important, though, was the careful balance between academic rigor and a reasonable writing style that doesn’t overwhelm the basic points. Even the chaper endnotes have a sentence or two of annotation, so you can judge whether or not you need to go further.
Best proof point: many of these ideas are mostly common-sense by now, although I hadn’t heard them expressed with such clarity until I read the book. I’m sure others have beaten this book to death via analysis, so I’ll finish by sharing a quote on when a product becomes a commodity. You don’t want to be a commodity!
A product becomes a commodity within a specific market segment when the repeated changes in the basis of competition, as described above, completely play themselves out, that is, when market needs on each attribute or dimension of performance have been fully satisfied by more than one available product. The performance oversupply framework may help consultants, managers, and researchers to understand the frustrated comments they reguarly hear from salespeople beaten down in price negotiations with customers: “Those stupid guys are just treating our product like it was a commodity. Can’t they see how much better our product is than the competition’s?” It may, in fact, be the case that the product offerings of competitors in a market continue to be differentiated from each other. But differentiation loses its meaning when the features and functionality have exceeded what the market demands. [p. 277, HarperBusiness trade paperback edition, 2003]
I bought The Innovator’s Solution at the same time, and I’ll get to that one soon enough.