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The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business Paperback – October 4, 2011

4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 501 ratings
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“Absolutely brilliant. Clayton Christensen provides an insightful analysis of changing technology and its importance to a company’s future success.”
—Michael R. Bloomberg

“This book ought to chill any executive who feels bulletproof —and inspire entrepreneurs aiming their guns.”
—Forbes

The Innovator’s Dilemma is the revolutionary business book that has forever changed corporate America. Based on a truly radical idea—that great companies can fail precisely because they do everything right—this Wall Street Journal, Business Week and New York Times Business bestseller is one of the most provocative and important business books ever written. Entrepreneurs, managers, and CEOs ignore its wisdom and its warnings at their great peril.

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  1. Print length
    336 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    HarperBusiness
  4. Publication date
    October 4, 2011
  5. Dimensions
    5.31 x 0.76 x 8 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    9780062060242
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0062060242
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

In this revolutionary bestseller, innovation expert Clayton M. Christensen says outstanding companies can do everything right and still lose their market leadership—or worse, disappear altogether. And not only does he prove what he says, but he tells others how to avoid a similar fate.

Focusing on “disruptive technology,” Christensen shows why most companies miss out on new waves of innovation. Whether in electronics or retailing, a successful company with established products will get pushed aside unless managers know when to abandon traditional business practices. Using the lessons of successes and failures from leading companies, The Innovator’s Dilemma presents a set of rules for capitalizing on the phenomenon of disruptive innovation.

Find out:

  • When it is right not to listen to customers.
  • When to invest in developing lower-performance products that promise lower margins.
  • When to pursue small markets at the expense of seemingly larger and more lucrative ones.

Sharp, cogent, and provocative, The Innovator’s Dilemma is one of the most talked-about books of our time—and one no savvy manager or entrepreneur should be without.

About the Author

CLAYTON M. CHRISTENSEN is the Kim B. Clark Professor at Harvard Business School, the author of nine books, a five-time recipient of the McKinsey Award for Harvard Business Review’s best article, and the cofounder of four companies, including the innovation consulting firm Innosight. In 2011 and 2013 he was named the world’s most influential business thinker in a biennial ranking conducted by Thinkers50.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0062060244
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ HarperBusiness; Reprint edition (October 4, 2011)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 336 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780062060242
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0062060242
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.31 x 0.76 x 8 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 501 ratings

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Clayton M. Christensen

Clayton M. Christensen

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Clayton M. Christensen is the Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. In addition to his most recent book, Competing Against Luck, he is the author of nine books, including several New York Times bestsellers — The Innovator's Dilemma, The Innovator's Solution, Disrupting Class, and and most recently How Will You Measure Your Life?. Christensen is the co-founder of Innosight, a growth-strategy consultancy; Rose Park Advisors, an investment firm; and the Christensen Institute, a non-profit think tank. In 2011 and 2013, he was named the world’s most influential business thinker by Thinkers50.

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
501 global ratings

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Customers say

Customers find the book provides valuable insights and useful information on product management. They describe the content as insightful, relevant, and well-supported. However, opinions differ on readability - some find it straightforward and easy to follow, while others feel the text is poorly written and cluttered with charts and graphs.

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InsightContent qualityReadability
93 customers mention "Insight"84 positive9 negative

Customers find the book provides valuable insights and actionable information on the disk drive industry. They say it's relevant today and a useful read. The book is presented interestingly, with good lessons and knowledge to be learned. It's a thoroughly researched investigation into an age-old business that provides good ideas for how companies can work with new technology.

"...The Innovator's Dilemma is an informative and fun read executive teams, marketing managers, entrepreneurs, and anyone with an interest in business..." Read more

"...Although originally published in 1997, it's a highly relevant and useful read today...." Read more

"...The core value of this book is that it gives specific, actionable strategies on when listening to consumers is dead wrong, when “what has worked..." Read more

"...The book itself is organized into fast moving, short chapters laying out the salient points distilled from the exhaustive research...." Read more

3 customers mention "Content quality"3 positive0 negative

Customers find the book provides an excellent foundation for anyone looking to build a product. They describe it as solid, well-supported, and powerful.

"...34;The Lean Startup" or "Rework" but it provides an excellent foundation for anyone looking to build a great company and product...." Read more

"Solid Product" Read more

"Counterintuitive, well-supported, and powerful..." Read more

65 customers mention "Readability"38 positive27 negative

Customers have different views on the book's readability. Some find it straightforward, easy to follow, and enlightening for business people. Others feel the text is poorly written, cluttered with charts and graphs, and not light reading.

"...The Innovator's Dilemma is an informative and fun read executive teams, marketing managers, entrepreneurs, and anyone with an interest in business..." Read more

"...the book is aimed at those in the business world, it is extremely easy to read and understandable from a non-business perspective...." Read more

"...The problem I have with Christensen's book is his writing style. He is definitely a Harvard Business School professor...." Read more

"...There is so much insight in this book that seems so obvious, but at the same so difficult for companies to digest or understand that I figured a lot..." Read more

Pages falling out of the book?
1 out of 5 stars
Pages falling out of the book?
While I would love to comment on the quality of the reading, the book itself showed up with a slash near the binding that caused a bunch of the pages to fall out. Its hard to enjoy a book when you need to worry about pages falling out of the binding.
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Top reviews from the United States

  • Winston Kotzan
    5.0 out of 5 stars A classic favorite of executive level managers
    Reviewed in the United States on March 26, 2011
    Verified Purchase
    I picked up this book after hearing the "innovator's dilemma" alluded to in several interviews by different CEOs. After reading this interesting piece on business strategy, it is no surprise why executive level management teams enjoy quoting this book. Innovator's Dilemma is a thoroughly researched investigation into an age old business phenomenon: How do businesses who were once dominant players in their industry get displaced by smaller, upcoming rivals?

    Well documented and lush with real world examples, The Innovator's Dilemma details case studies from a variety of industries where large corporations had the dominant market share and then abruptly lost it to upcoming rivals that seemed to come out of the blue. Did these "good" companies fail because of poor management? Were these companies blindsided because their organizations were too bureaucratic to react to the marketplace? "No", says the The Innovator's Dilemma. Many times, a even when a large corporation follows conventional business school training and "does all the right things", it can still be overcome by a smaller, nimbler newcomer to the market.

    Two kinds of marketplace changes are outlined: incremental (sustaining) and disruptive technologies. While the R&D efforts of large companies respond well to incremental changes in technology, they perform poorly against disruptive changes in technology. A disruptive change is when a new technology starts off catering to the needs of a low-end niche market, and then through incremental improvements, becomes a viable contender to the larger dominant players up-market. A host of examples are reviewed to show how this change takes place: the churn of dominant disk drive manufacturers, the shift from cable-based ground excavators to hydraulic excavators, the rise of low-volume high turnover retailers like K-Mart versus the low turnover department store models, the proliferation of small steel manufacturing plants.

    This book explores why large corporations are so unequipped to deal with disruptive changes. Surprisingly, they often yield to disruptive changes in their marketplace not because of poor management, but because the goals and objectives of such large corporations causes them to overlook the threat posed by the newcomer. Think of how IBM overlooked the advent of the PC because they had the mindset, "Why would anyone need a personal computer in their home?"

    Although written in 2002, changes in the marketplace over the last ten years have only given its ideas confirmation. We have seen the Innovator's Dilemma dynamic play out in Apple's iPhone upsetting the dominant Blackberry, the Kindle replace traditional channels of publishing, and the rise of cloud computing beginning to displace established "big business" ERP companies. The Innovator's Dilemma is an informative and fun read executive teams, marketing managers, entrepreneurs, and anyone with an interest in business strategy.
    5 people found this helpful
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  • L. David Marquet
    5.0 out of 5 stars Trying hard isn't enough
    Reviewed in the United States on September 28, 2010
    Verified Purchase
    We are all familiar with the story of the innovative and nimble startup surpassing the corporate leader with a disruptive technology that the larger corporation was blind to. Why this happens is the subject of Clayton Christensen's thoughtful Innovator's Dilemma. Although originally published in 1997, it's a highly relevant and useful read today.
    Christensen was interested in how the market leaders missed the disruptive innovations. At the time, most thought the corporate leaders were just too arrogant or too bureaucratic to see the disruption coming. Could there be more structural forces at play? Turns out, there are.

    The first half of the book follows the development of the disk drive and the hydraulic excavator to understand and make clear these forces. First, the author distinguishes between sustaining technologies and disruptive technologies. Market leaders, it turns out, are capable of innovation but those innovations typically occur as incremental evolutionary changes to existing products - sustaining innovations.

    Where they get tripped up is the development of disruptive technologies which fundamentally transform the existing product. In many cases the market leader also developed early forms of the disruptive technology or were at least aware of the development of the technology.
    Christensen, a professor at the Harvard Business School, makes the case that in ignoring the disruptive technology, the market leader was acting quite rationally. They were following their customers' and corporation's best interests.

    Christensen discovered that the disruptive technology yields a product that is inferior as measured by the traditional metrics for product quality. In the case of the disk drive it was price/unit storage. For the excavators, it was reach. For the disk drives, the disruption was the introduction of smaller and smaller drives. At each step of the way, these products were costlier than the existing larger drives in terms of price/unit storage. However, their advantages, in terms of other characteristics such as size, weight, and power consumption outweighed nominal improvement in the price/unit storage ratio provided by sustaining technologies. Eventually, price catches up and the disruptive products are better in both sets of characteristics.

    For the excavator (a big digger), the existing machines used cables to extend and control the basket. The overriding measure of performance was reach and capacity - how far out could the basket reach and grab a bucket of dirt. When hydraulic excavators appeared, their reach was very limited because of the physics of the hydraulic cylinders needed to control the baskets. Even today, a cable excavator will give you a longer reach. However, the hydraulic excavators had advantages of safety (no cable breaks) and had significantly lower maintenance costs. Eventually, as manufacturing of hydraulic excavators grew in practice, reach extended and for many uses such as building foundation excavation and utility pipe laying, as soon as the reach was sufficient for the task, the improvement in safety and the reduced maintenance costs made the hydraulic excavators superior.

    This book will change the way you think about innovation and the structures needed not only to spark the ideas, but get them built into new product lines.
    One person found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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  • MURAT BESHTOEV
    5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best business books
    Reviewed in Canada on July 23, 2021
    Verified Purchase
    This book removes confusion surrounding innovation. If you want to have a clear understanding regarding where you need to focus your effort and capital, this is a must-read book.
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  • neophitus
    5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 2, 2017
    Verified Purchase
    Good book!
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  • Amazon Kunde
    5.0 out of 5 stars Must read!
    Reviewed in Germany on June 15, 2017
    Verified Purchase
    Very interesting book. It is of highest interest for everyone working in the field of innovationmanagement. The Thesises in this book are not only helping by understanding often discussed phenomena but also by creating new strategic approaches towards innovation.

    I can highly recommend this book and i will also read other publications of the author!
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  • Felipe
    1.0 out of 5 stars Ideal para dormir
    Reviewed in Mexico on July 21, 2016
    Verified Purchase
    Me gusta terminar todos los libros que comienzo, pero este ha sido muy pesado y me es imposible terminar. Demasiados datos duros y estadísticas que lo hacen muy aburrido. Como estar escuchando a un orador monótono. Por cada palabra se mencionan tres cifras.

    Fácilmente se pudieron haber ahorrado 200 páginas para explicarlo mejor.

    La única manera de ir a la par es tomando notas, como de vuelta en la escuela.

    Muy buenas ideas, muy buenas investigaciones, pero muy mal escrito. No hay esfuerzo alguno para atrapar al lector.

    Hay mejores opciones definitivamente.
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  • Family Martinez
    5.0 out of 5 stars STRATEGIC THINKING
    Reviewed in Spain on February 9, 2014
    Verified Purchase
    Si siempre has querido saber porque han tenido exito los emprendedores que innovan necesitas este libro , y tambien si te gusta la direccion estrategica es muy recomendable .

    Coges muy buenas ideas para luego crear algo que sea una revolucion en el mercado .
    Report