BIF Bookshelf: Putting Disruptive Innovation to Work

It's no small feat to add to the body of work created by BIF research advisor Clay Christensen. It's been more than 10 years since Christensen changed the innovation landscape with his seminal work on disruptive innovation called The Innovator's Dilemma. Since then, he's published two additional books on the subject and co-founded a successful consulting firm Innosight.

Now, three members of Innosight - Scott Anthony, Mark Johnson, Joseph Sinfield - and Elizabeth Altman of Motorola have written a new book called The Innovator's Guide to Growth which takes Christensen's theories and puts them into practice. Through frameworks, tools and templates, the authors provide an accessible roadmap for transformation that any corporate manager or entrepreneur can follow.

How do you reliably build growth businesses and create innovation capabilities? Clay Christensen's disruptive theory will tell you to plug growth gaps and routinely surprise the market. The Innovator's Guide to Growth breaks down that process into four parts:

Identify Opportunities
Chapters 2 through 4 cover how to spot opportunities to create novel growth businesses. It bucks the conventional approach to innovation that targets demanding customers and instead the authors show different approaches to tapping into customers who can not, will not or do not consume your product or service.

Formulate and Shape Ideas
Chapters 5 and 6 demonstrate how the normal process by which companies evaluate and shape opportunities is often the wrong one. The authors' approach is based on the concept of pattern recognition - specifically the fundamental pattern of disruptive innovation. These patterns transform existing markets or create new ones by "trading off raw performance in the name of simplicity, convenience, affordability or accessibility." (page 121, The Innovator's Guide to Growth)

Build the Business
Chapters 7 and 8 offer a framework for turning a great idea into a profitable business as well as forming a team to initiate early-stage activities. The authors offer simple steps for mastering the emergent strategies necessary to significantly improve the odds of success which include identifying critical areas of uncertainty and executing smart experiments.

Build Capabilities
How do you organize to innovate in a repeatable and routine fashion? Chapters 9 and 10 delivers structures and processes to facilitate the continued creation of new growth initiatives as well as a set of innovation-friendly metrics.

All told, The Innovator's Guide to Growth is a solid contribution to innovation research and a wonderful extension of Clay Christensen's disruptive theories. As business grapples to meet today's global challenges, this book will help any leader deal effectively with finding new growth opportunities.

Related
I had the opportunity to interview BIF research advisor Clay Christensen a while back. Learn more about his disruptive innovation theory: download pdf

Learn more about Innosight

Buy the book The Innovator's Guide to Growth

Posted June 19, 2008 10:24 AM by Chris Flanagan | Permalink