The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth

The core of what the book discusses boils down to how to target the right customers with the right products while ensuring that those products do not become commodities with razor thin margins. This is essentially a foil of Senteo’s own methodology of defining the customer’s wants, needs, and desires before creating a customize product offering. The segmentation goes beyond simple age, gender, and ethnicity; both Senteo and the authors emphasize the analysis of the customer by their situational context and specific needs in order to create specialized offerings for each segment. Again, we have a great deal of respect for the book’s initiative to analyze existing success and postulate how market dominance can lead to eventual failure. Banks are no different in this case as they can lose market share should a new company undercut their prices or have a new offering that is appealing to consumers.

Unfortunately the authors did not note many of the companies that have made innovative changes to their existing business models, instead sticking to only published research. We believe this was an oversight; had the authors done their own research they would have addressed the numerous examples in service, software, and medical testing industries. These cases would have given additional breadth and material to support the authors’ theory. The advice and claims that the authors make in the book towards existing businesses stray away from the cautious tone of The Investor’s Dilemma, discrediting these theories as more rash and possibly ineffective in realistic application. We account this spark of rash decision making to a lack of field experience, and would say that input from an operations executive would have challenged the authors to reevaluate their claims. Interviews would possibly remedy this situation, as the research seems inadequate to capture the emotional and situational context found in executive decision making. The latter half of the book speaks of concrete details for company organization and executive involvement, and it is this section that is begging for real world perspective and not observational deductions.

In his international bestseller The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton M. Christensen exposed this crushing paradox behind the failure of many industry leaders: by placing too much focus on pleasing their most profitable customers, these firms actually paved the way for their own demise by ignoring the disruptive technologies that aggressively evolved to displace them. In The Innovator’s Solution, Christensen and coauthor Michael E. Raynor help all companies understand how to become disruptors themselves.

Clay Christensen (author of the award-winning Harvard Business Review article, “How Will You Measure Your Life?”) and Raynor not only reveal that innovation is more predictable than most managers have come to believe, they also provide helpful advice on the business decisions crucial to truly disruptive growth. Citing in-depth research and theories tested in hundreds of companies across many industries, the authors identify the processes that create successful innovation—and they show managers how to tailor their strategies to the changing circumstances of a dynamic world.

This book’s place is as a sequel to The Innovator’s Dilemma and should be coupled with it accordingly. Groundwork for this book is rooted in its predecessor, and full understanding of the context can only truly be gained through reading both. Those who would benefit from this book, again, are the executives and strategic thinkers of businesses. These are individuals who can make decisions pertaining to the direction of the company, so they would benefit from understanding the impact of disruptions on the business. To a lesser extent, market researchers stand to gain from understanding new methods of qualitative research, while smaller businesses can glean insight for how to turn disruptions against larger companies. As the title suggests, though, this is merely a solution to the dilemma of disruptions and innovations changing the balance of the markets, and much of the understanding must be garnered from other books.