The Innovator's Solution - Clayton Christensen

Filed in archive Entrepreneurship on November 27, 2004

Clayton Christensen has been in March 2004 at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco. I just found this venerable site that features many good presentations from highly qualified speakers.

The audio feed runs for more than 1.5 hours but I highly recommend taking the time and learning about the ideas in his second book "The innovators solution". Clayton is a very talented speaker who is a master in illustrative communication about highly abstract topics. My main two takeaways from his lesson were:

- A) If an emerging company wants to succeed with establishing itself against the incumbents it needs to find the "sweet spot" where incumbents don't want to go into because of various reason (i.e. margins, cannibalization)

- B) He outlines and can predict to a certain extent in which parts of the value chain within an industry money can be made. As his theory suggests these interesting spots change frequently over the years and follow a certain pattern.

So I'm suggesting you should download the MP3 to your Ipod and getting out of your next flight with the satisfaction having learned something valuable :-)