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 A must for product developers
In this book, Christensen and Raynor argue that disruptive technologies (those technologies with a great potential, like for example: LCD displays, 802.11 wireless protocols, Linux OS, etc) are stall in some companies because of their own culture. The authors explain how innovation can be a predictable process that delivers sustainable and profitable growth. They identify the forces that cause managers to make bad decisions and present their ideas and a new framework to help product developers to create the right conditions, at the right time, for a disrupting-technology to succeed in the company and the market. They provide real-life examples from many different companies (companies like IBM, AT&T, Sony, Microsoft, and others) that sustain their claims. The authors recommend in the book a mix of sustaining innovations, outsourcing of commoditized products, and recognition and development of disruptive technology-based products. This book identifies the processes that create successful innovations and the most important thing is the strategies that can be applied in your own project.
 Understands the problem but not the solution. Impractical.
This book makes a prescription. It's a pretty simple one. Make sure innovation happens. Hire people to cannibalize the business you are in. Back those people. I will say flatly it is simple-minded. Another strategy is for a company to get in on disruptive technologies by participating in a venture capital pool in their sector. That's an insurance policy, and a win-win all the way around. They can get a look at what is coming at them and so they can make plans for what the future life of their current line is likely to be - invaluable business intelligence. If the competition is really a disrupter, they get the big payoff from their venture capital investment. Heads they win, tails they win. This book has a good description of how things work, but the prescription isn't terribly useful. It indicates just how lacking in real world experience Mr. Raynor is.
 Very good explanation of the solution
This is easier to read than the Innovators Dilemma. There is a more varied range of Product and Industry case studies, which helps to show how broadly this theory can be applied. What I did like is how he covers the footnotes at the end of each Chapter - so if they don't interest you, you can skip over them, but if they do interest you, then you don't have to struggle to the back of the book. I wish more authors & publishers would use that technique. One quibble - given his Economics background, he suggests that having competing phone standards is not wasteful. Only an Economist would say that. A Consumer finds it frustrating. He has the good grace to suggest in a footnote that some readers might take issue with him, and I am one. He belittles the benefit of schoolgirls from Sweden using their phone on vacation in Spain, but I can vouch that being able to readily check on the safety of my teenage daughters when they're in foreign Countries for over 10% of the year is a definite benefit! Given his Economics background - of course there are plenty of graphs, and 99% of them are straight lines - there are no time dependent variances in his world. Also some silly proof-reading slips, such as a "semi-log" graph being described as "semi- long". Probably still worth reading the Innovators Dilemma before reading this one, just to get the theory.
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