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Description:
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When Clay Christensen left the business world and entered academia,
he was intrigued by the question, “What is it that kills successful
companies?” If you look at business history, he mused, almost every
company that at one point was widely regarded as unassailably successful
is, just a few short decades later, either in the middle of the pack
or at the bottom of the heap. Why is this? After studying the phenomenon
for about eight years, Christensen reached the odd conclusion that it
is actually the paradigms of good management that are taught at the Harvard
Business School that sow the seeds of every company’s ultimate
demise. In other words, “If you’re wildly successful, you’re
doomed.”
Interestingly, on the other side of every one of those corporate fatalities
was a tremendous entrepreneurial success story. Christensen’s second
wave of research focused on how entrepreneurs starting new ventures and
innovators within existing companies can reignite growth. Is there a
way to grow a business with a high probability of success that would
allow innovators to squash an established, well-run competitor?
In this ITSMA Viewpoint, Christensen, Harvard Business School
professor, co-founder of Innosight LLC, and author of The Innovator’s
Dilemma (1997), The Innovator’s Solution (2003), and Seeing
What’s Next (2004), discusses disruptive innovation—how
to do it, how to survive it, and how marketing can help.
Key takeaways include:
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Compete against non-consumption. Find a population of people
who don’t currently have access to a product because it's complex
and expensive. Figure out a way to make it simple and affordable,
and you have a disruptive opportunity.
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Attack the market leader at the low-end. Create an economic
model that will allow you to go after a piece of business that is unattractive
to the leader. Rather than go after you, the leader will flee up-market.
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Build
purpose brands. If there is a “job” to do, position
your product or service to do that job.
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