The Innovator's Solution

Dan Bricklin reviews Clayton Christensen's sequel to the Innovator's Delimma, The Innovator's Solution -- with a wholehearted recommendation.

The new book provides more frameworks and checklists for deciding where and how to innovate. Dan thinks the book is better suited for startup entreprenuers than corporate managers. As co-inventor of Visicalc, he would know.

One of my professors as b-school, Al Osborne, constantly hammered the advice for entreprenuers to experiment at the margin. Innovation is the fruit of polinized specialization. Startups play in whitespace opportunities that only contrarians can find. Not all survive, ones that do have good marginal judgement. Places where both valuing options and having vision are the only ways to see how to monetize and scale initial opportunity. The core of the innovator's delimma is that incumbents are blinded to the change that will disrupt them, which creates opportunities for challengers.

The theories, backed with many interesting footnotes and references, should be taken to heart by people who put down simple, "not-good-enough" innovations. "Because new-market disruptions compete against nonconsumption, the incumbent leaders feel no pain and little threat until the disruption is in its final stages. In fact, when the disruptors begin pulling customers out of the low end of the original value network, it actually feels good to the leading firms, because they move up-market in their own world, for a time they are replacing low-margin revenues that disruptors steal, with higher-margin revenues from sustaining innovations." [Page 46]

Dan uses the following passage to argue for how blogging is a disruptive technology:

Another theory: "...customers -- people and companies -- have 'jobs' that arise regularly and need to get done. When customers become aware of a job that they need to get done in their lives, they look around for a product or service that they can 'hire' to get the job done." [Page 75]

This theory directly counters recent statements by John Markoff at the NY Times that blogging hasn't created jobs in traditional media so its not a significant threat.

The biggest change since boom and bust has been greater social interaction on the Net. Segments of a technology adoption lifecycle are passing through this social wave, each differentiated by how they communicate with each other. First through code, then through words, then through pictures, sound, etc.

First to do so were technical innovators, which led to the disruptive creation of open source, a new mode of production that is upending the software industry. Now traditional print media is upended by people collaborating through a combination of code and words. Dating, recruiting and classified advertising are being distrupted by new ways for people to connect with each other.

Other industries should take note, but they probably won't.