These are my takeaways from the book The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen
- Why was it that firms that could be esteemed as aggressive, innovative, customer-sensitive organizations could ignore or attend belatedly to technological innovations with enormous strategic importance? Companies that become large and successful find that maintaining growth becomes progressively more difficult. Disruptive Technology which in most cases emerge within small markets don’t solve the growth needs of large companies. Therefore leading to the failure of technological transition.
The trajectory of performance improvement that technology is able to provide may have a distinctly different slope from the trajectory of performance improvement demanded in the system-of-use by downstream customers within any given value network. When the slope of these 2 trajectories are similar, we expect the technology to remain relatively contained within its initial value network. But when the slopes differ, net technologies that are initially performance-competitive only within emerging or commercially remote value networks may migrate into other networks
It seems to be very difficult to manage peaceful unambiguous coexistence of 2 cost structures: This can be done by spinning out an independent organization or by acquiring an appropriately small company
Below are the quotes that didn’t make it to my top 3.
- Established firms attempt to push new technology into their established markets, while the successful entrants find a new market that values the technology.
- Blindly following the maxim that good managers should keep close to their customers can sometimes be a fatal mistake
- Established firms(established in the industry prior to the advent of the technology) and Entrant Firms(New to the industry)
- The challenge is to successfully switch technologies at the point where S-curves of old and new intersect
- Successful established firms to change strategies and cost structures, not technology
- Paradigms of sound management are useless when dealing with disruptive technology
- VALUE NETWORK: a cost structure that firms within it must create if they are to provide the products and services in the priority their customers demand
- There is no evidence that any of the leaders in developing and adopting sustaining technologies developed a discernable competitive advantage over the followers
- Disruptive technologies often enable something to be done that previously deemed impossible. Because of this, when they initially emerge, neither manufacturers nor customers know how or why the products will be used and hence do not know what specific features of the product will and will not ultimately be valued: Therefore, managers should be formulating plans for learning and discovery rather than plans for executions
