Book review - The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen

The Innovator's Dilemma has been stated to be business literature classic. Book by Clayton M. Christensen has been quoted in many books I have read and I wanted to know what it is all about.

Innovator's Dilemma as a title is bit misleading. Book is really about organizations and technology change and development. In there is the problem called Innovator's Dilemma, but for me at least it was a bit of surprise. I had thought book would tell more about innovation as individuals, but it is all about organizational abilities to adapt to innovation.

Book is thorough. It really tells the history of couple of industries and dives in to the root causes of the problems. I appreciate that it is based on facts, but I would have not needed to know those in such a detail level. It is more of a school book than a self learning book.

Nevertheless the criticism about writing style and readability, book contents are great. It really explains well why same organizations that prosper in sustaining technologies can't keep up with disruptive technologies. There's lot of excellent and interesting insights that really helps understanding organizations and businesses better.

It's a controversial book in that sense. It's a book I'm really happy I did read, but on the other had, it was quite boring to read time to time. I would love that someone would have taken this book to 2010 and written it in more interesting way.

This is a must read for anyone making business and organizational decisions in large scale. I bet they all know the book, but somehow the same things happen all the time. New small companies come in and steal the market from the old players. This book explains why.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen