Innovator's Dilemma

The Innovator's Dilemma is a book about disruptive technologies and how companies either adapted or not. Some companies go out of business because they either failed to recognize a new technology or because they fail to act on a new technology. Other businesses succeed because they do adapt quickly. So what is the dilemma? Company owners and managers have to make decisions about new investments and it can be difficult to know when and how much to invest. It's those decisions that lead to success or failure.

The author, Clayton M. Christensen, examines a few case histories exploring this dilemma. He tries to provide examples and perspective so that company owners can be a bit more aware of their business and new technologies. The most interesting case history was the study on hard drive manufacturers. Moore's law comes into focus and new hard drives became more powerful and smaller. Companies that adapted quickly did well, others did not because they could not see ahead. This case history was interesting to me because I have a fascination with computer history.

Another example was the evolution of the typewriter versus word processing on computers. If I remember correctly, the example compared the actions of IBM to Smith Corona, with IBM eventually coming out on top.

Aside from those two examples, the rest of the book was fairly boring and a bit out of date. I don't feel the book provided all that much help in trying to deal with disruptive technologies. It is a dilemma and the marketplace is constantly changing as new technologies are developed. I'm not sure there is much that can be done to prevent a business from failing. It takes an insightful owner who is willing to risk that a business has a chance of both surviving and succeeding long term.

The books I select for review are books which I personally select from my local library. I do not receive any reimbursement from authors or publishers or free books. I do provide links to Amazon as a convenience to the readers of this blog. I may earn a small referral.