The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth Hardcover – November 19, 2013

Good information for business

This is turning common marketing and product development wisdom on its head. The basic idea is that you should not follow the masses, go with the flow or to look at previous successes to define your future products and services. Instead look at how people use products and services in their every day life and develop something that will do it better (cheaper, faster, more pleasant).I loved the airport example about the smart phone...for years we're sold that we need to bring all the office applications onto the berries and PDAs (think Word, Excel, PowerPoint)...your office away from office for all these road warriors. Well it turns out, people don't really care to do office work while on the road. When they have 5-10 minutes to kill at the airport people (when not talking on the phone) like to read the paper, play games, browse through magazines, check sports and stocks online and watch TV. So your competition is not the desktop applications but the newspapers, TV and the entertainment. Voila, need to figure out how to bring that onto the berries/PDA instead of how to cram rich SW apps on the screen.Another great example was the smoothie cafe. The owners tried all the usual marketing techniques (discounts, different flavors, names) to increase sales to no success. Then they analyzed for a whole week how people use their product. They find out in the morning most people bought a smoothie as a better on-the-go breakfast alternative (coffee was not fulfilling, bananas were messy, doughnuts were less healthy, sandwiches hard to maneuver while driving etc). In the afternoon moms with kids were most of the customers. They bought a smoothie to give a healthier, more fulfilling and cheaper snack to the kids. So the owners adjusted the product to these 2 main uses instead of one universal change across the board.The book teaches you a new way to look at competition and what you need to innovate against:Stop looking at your direct competitors to think about innovation (if we had that feature as they did, if we had more widgets, more colors, more sizes...) instead ask yourself if people are not buying this kind of product / service, then what are they doing today to fulfill the need? And so that is your real competition. Sometimes they do nothing in which case you have a virgin territory to explore.The book warns the change is not easy and in fact is susceptible to lot of push back. There are suggestions and practical examples on how to start implementing this new thinking in the organization.If anything the book it's a very refreshing look on the strategic planning required to building new products and services. Definitely a great discussion point.

The book repeats most everything from the "Dilemma" book and, unless readers want some interesting historical examples, there is no need to read the first.The most suitable prerequisites and circumstances for hatching successful disruptive businesses are explained in detail. These are suggested as the main route to predictable growth for existing and new companies.The book is quite repetitive and I suspect it to somewhat oversimplify complex issues, also using a scientific language while offering theories that aren't really proven. However the ideas presented and the clearly structured content convincingly offer the reader insights into margin fluctuations in the value network and the logic of growth.You quickly get used to the author calling him selves "we", like if the book was actually a scientific publication.Highly recommended, also if you have already read the "Dilemma" book.

It’s highly recommended to stock investors, regardless of active or passive. For readers who have finished Mr. Fishers’ book “Common Stock, Uncommon Profits”, and Chris Mayer’s book “100 Baggers”, no doubt we may have questions about how to spot or screen the potential candidates to research and study further. More importantly, things will change. That’s a cliche. Investors love their invested companies that have strong competitive moat, high profitability, keep reinvesting and growing. However, that also maps to what this book suggested, it feels good to grow financially. While all data is delayed by years, data point does not reflect the current competitive status. Although this book, along with Innovator’s Dilemmas, may not give us exactly what makes a great investment like Mr. Fishers’ layout in his book, it provides a clear and useful frameworks for investors to understand what makes quality disruption, and what to watch out. It’s a great gift from the authors, that we can have a life-saving toolkit in our toolbox during our journey.

Prof Christensen, in this concise book, aims to develop a theory to explain how disruption occurs (much of which he had already done in Innovator's Dillemma) and how companies can position themselves to defend their markets, exploit opportunities in disrupted markets, and tell the difference between incremental market improvements and disruptions.Disruption, he describes convincingly, usually occurs at the "bottom" of the market, where new companies compete mainly with non-consumption and powerful incumbents would not mind. The best example I found was used in many different chapter, was that of department stores being moved to high margin clothing by discounters and category killers. The disruptors came in and took the most undesirable parts of the business and built a model to make it economical.The most brilliant insight, however, I found to be the effect when the disruption is complete, that is, when the original incumbent is driven out of the market. Then margins fall precipitously, since the marginal cost now is at the disruptor rather than the disruptee.A manager facing a disrupted industry would do well to read this book. In it, there are simple pieces of advice on how a company should organize to gain the agility to implement a disruptive model, even if originating within the incumbent. You will read it and immediately start looking for disruptions all around you, eager to find one that can be exploited. The model developed is very interesting, as the authors spend quite a bit of writing on the underpinnings of the theory. Overall, it is a very useful book, though if you are a practical businessman (rather than one interested in and who finds theories helpful) you will likely not enjoy it. Theorists in business would be the best atrget audience.