The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth

The Growth Paradox

At best one company in ten is able to sustain profitable growth. Yet capital markets demand that all companies seek it relentlessly and mercilessly punish those who fail. Why is consistent, persistent growth so difficult to achieve? Surprisingly, it’s not for lack of great ideas or capable managers, nor is it because customers are too fickle or innovation too unpredictable. Innovation fails, say Clayton M. Christensen and Michael E. Raynor, because organizations unwittingly strip the disruptive potential from new ideas before they ever see the light of day.

In his worldwide bestseller The Innovator’s Dilemma, Christensen explained how industry leaders get blindsided by disruptive innovations precisely because they focus too closely on their most profitable customers and businesses. The Innovator’s Solution shows how companies get to the other side of this dilemma, creating disruptions rather than being destroyed by them.

Drawing on years of in-depth research and illustrated by company examples across many industries, Christensen and Raynor argue that innovation can be a predictable process that delivers sustainable, profitable growth. They identify the forces that cause managers to make bad decisions as they package and shape new ideas—and offer new frameworks to help managers create the right conditions, at the right time, for a disruption to succeed. The Innovator’s Solution addresses a wide range of issues, including:

• How can we tell if an idea has disruptive potential?

• Which competitive situations favor incumbents, and which favor entrants?

• Which customer segments are primed to embrace a new offering?

• Which activities should we outsource, and which should we keep in-house?

• How should we structure and fund a new venture?

• How do we choose the right managers to lead it?

• How can we position ourselves where profits will be made in the future?

Revealing counterintuitive insights that will change your perspective on innovation forever, this landmark book shows how to create a disruptive growth engine that fuels ongoing success.

For those who aren't in the know, Clayton M. Christensen's books are now the management bible for a host of Fortune 500 companies including Cisco, Proctor & Gamble and Jonhson & Johnson.

Christensen helps explain why Fortune 500 company management have traditionally ignored the upstarts that will make them irrelevant tomorrow... and what they can do about it. Tellingly, the new upstarts will cannibalize billions of dollars of revenue, which is why the established leaders either ignore them, or when they buy them, accidentally kill them in the quixotic goal of protecting their cash cow profit centers.

Christensen helps these companies not only identify what types of opportunities are going to become the competition tomorrow, but how to actively nurture them in a corporate environment where profit maximization would necessitate their death... without immediately dropping those precious cash cows.

The Innovator's Solution (and the others in this series, but I like this one the best) is a must read for both established companies looking to stay relevant tomorrow as well as those pesky upstarts seeking to kill the competition by finding the kinks in the armor of the established leaders.

A must read for anybody in the Innovation field. It shows some crucial characteristics an innovation initiative should have to increase it's probability to be successful. A classic in the field.

Awesome condition and delivered at my home ASAP.

I received the book in like 3 - 4 days and that too from a different state.

The book is as good as new...can hardly tell that its not new...i wud recommend this seller to anyone

This was required reading for an MBA Entrepreneurial Growth class. It quickly became the reference to almost every case that we discusssed. It is one of the best books I've ever read. It completely opened my eyes to a new world. It addresses some of the fundamental questions of an entrepreneur. How can a new business beat the reigning behemoths in an industry? How can the reigning behemoths defend against these threats? I continually find myself thinking back to concepts in this book.

This is the most influential book I have read in my career and as an avid reader of many great books over the years, this says a lot. There are profound implications for leaders from a variety of disciplines--whether Marketing, Product Development, Sales or Executive leadership. This book provides specific examples of affecting significant growth within your organization.

Our whole organization is aligning with the strategies proposed in the Innovator's Solution and already, we are seeing significant changes in how we market and how we sell. My highest recommendadtion for the Innovator's Solution!