Bookshelf: The Innovator's Guide To Growth: Putting Disruptive Innovation To Work
By Scott D. Anthony, Mark W. Johnson, Joseph V. Sinfield and Elizabeth J. Altman, forward by Clayton M. Christensen, Harvard Business Press, 2008, 320 pages, $35.00
More than a decade ago Clayton Christensen's book, The Innovator's Dilemma, illustrated how disruptive innovations drive industry transformation and market creation. Christensen's research demonstrated how growth-seeking incumbents must simultaneously maintain their core business, deflect disruptive attacks and seize disruptive opportunities.
In this new book, the authors take the subject to the next level -- implementation. They explain how to create this crucial capability for unlocking disruption's transformational power. Examples include Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Pepsi, Intel, Motorola, SAP and Cisco Systems. The intent is to show management how to leverage that transformational power. Examples include how to:
Identify potential innovation opportunities -- by understanding evolving problems of customers and consumers.
Formulate and shape ideas -- by using past patterns of success and failure to assess and refine ideas.
Build an innovation business -- by developing a plan to take a promising idea forward and assembling and managing a team to initiate early-stage activities, by maximizing an uncertain idea's chances of success and by empowering teams to work on disruptive ideas.
Build innovation capabilities -- by institutionalizing the innovation process in a way that makes the pursuit of growth repeatable and even routine and by ensuring that a company's internal structures and processes and its external interactions support its efforts to create new growth businesses.
