Book Summary: The Innovator's Dilemma (when new technologies cause great firms to fail) by Clayton Christensen
The book presents Clayton’s counter-intuitive thesis on how firms with good management practices and a sound understanding of their customers’ needs eventually fail at disruptive innovations while still succeeding at sustainable innovations. The book emphasizes that its not engineering but management oversight that leads to the demise of incumbents in the face of disruptive innovations. One-line summary: At some point, the incumbent’s product’s performance exceeds the demand of most customers. Then the “edge” that these performance metrics provided is lost, and the customers’ value proposition changes. They start valuing some other metrics, along which a disruptor’s product has better performance. The disruptor has an early mover’s advantage as well as leading to the demise of the incumbent. The following are the salient ideas raised in the book.