Innovate or Perish: Managing the Enduring Technology Company in the Global Market

Varied Paths of Innovation

Polymath CEOs must begin by looking at the spectrum of various business models before they can get down to practical implementation within their company.

In contemplating the paths of innovation that “diverge in the woods,” a CEO has to decide where to place the company’s focus, a task that to most appears daunting. Clayton Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor and leading light of the innovation movement, says that for many CEOs innovation resembles the proverbial “black box,” which is a mistaken notion.

In The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth,^[7] Christensen and coauthor Michael Raynor dissect the enigma wherein brilliant ideas seem to spontaneously arise out of nowhere. They insist that creating new growth businesses is predictable once you study the process by which innovation transpires.

^[7] Christensen, Clayton M., and Raynor, Michael E. The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2003).

“The quest for predictability in an endeavor as complex as innovation is not quixotic. What brings predictability to any field is a body of well-researched theory—contingent statements of what causes what and why.” The goal, they say, is for managers who need to grow new businesses with predictable success to become disruptors instead of disruptees and kill the well-run established competitors.

In their opinion, top management has three jobs: “The first is a ...