★★★☆☆ This is not a book about innovation -- it is a book about managing innovation

The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

Clayton M Christensen

** Mild spoilers for the movie Glass Onion follow **

I read The Innovator's Dilemma when I was in biz school, so around 2000. We studied Christensen's ideas in one of my classes, Marketing, I think. We were not assigned his book to read, but, being a reader, I got it and read it, anyway. It's an OK book and has some valuable ideas in it, but it is not, in my opinion, the groundbreaking work it is usually presented as. One of the most useful things I learned in biz school is that business management is a field that is frequently riven by new management fads. These fads spread like infections, with consulting firms as some of the main vectors. Most of these ideas are stupid blizzards of almost meaningless buzzwords backed up by very little evidence.

Christensen rode the fashion tornado. His ideas about disruptive innovations were all the rage for a short time. They are actually among the better of management fads, in that Christensen has some valuable ideas, and he actually based them on hard data. Perhaps as a consequence "disruptive innovation" is a thing people are still talking about. (Almost all the talk is nonsense and bears no relationship to Christensen's actual ideas.)

I was reminded of this by the movie Glass Onion, which I saw yesterday. One of the central characters in Glass Onion is billionaire Miles Bron. Early in the film Benoit Blanc asks him what he means by "disruptor". Bron responds with an impressive-sounding but mind-bogglingly stupid description of what disruption means. This is our first clue that Miles Bron is a clueless windbag. Later in the film we get a glimpse of his repudiated business partner Andi Brand's apartment, and there, among her books, we see a copy of The Innovator's Dilemma, hinting that Andi was the brains of the business partnership.

The most important thing to realize about The Innovator's Dilemma is that it is not about innovation, per se -- it is about why established businesses are bad at managing innovation. The reasons are straightforward -- a disruptive innovation breaks the business model by which an established business became successful (that is, more or less, the definition of "disruptive innovation"), so all their old rules and structures don't work.

Disruptive innovations are not typically technologically brilliant. Indeed, they may barely be innovations at all. The main example Christensen relies on is computer disk drives. Over the course of several years 5.25 in drives were replaced by 3.5 in drives. If you know how to make a 5.25 in drive, you pretty much know how to make a 3.5 in drive -- you make the same thing, but smaller. Obviously I am simplifying, but not enormously. This is not a super-difficult engineering challenge. (It is interesting that disk drives are indeed scientifically and technically sophisticated devices. Most modern drive heads are based on something called the quantum Hall effect, a scientific idea truly based in quantum mechanics, that required a new fabrication technique to put into practice. Christensen knows this, but he is careful to point out that this was NOT the disruptive innovation. The disruptive innovation was the easy one of making the drives smaller.) Christensen explains to us why drive manufacturers failed to foresee and skillfully manage this size change.

I didn't find The Innovator's Dilemma very interesting, because it is not really about innovation or innovators -- the title is misleading. It takes innovation as given -- something that happens to your industry, and which you need to somehow deal with.

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