ABOUT THE BOOK
MORE THAN A DECADE AGO, Clayton Christensen's breakthrough book The Innovator's Dilemma illustrated how disruptive innovations drive industry transformation and market creation. Christensen's research demonstrated how growth-seeking incumbents must develop the capability to deflect disruptive attacks and seize disruptive opportunities.
In The Innovator's Guide to Growth, Scott Anthony, Mark Johnson, Joseph Sinfield, and Elizabeth Altman take the subject to the next level: implementation. The authors explain how to create this crucial capability for unlocking disruption's transformational power.
With a foreword by Christensen, this book provides a set of market-proven tools and approaches to innovation that have been honed through fieldwork with innovative companies like Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Pepsi, Intel, Motorola, SAP, and Cisco Systems. The book shows you how to:
- Follow a market-proven process — so your company can reliably create blockbuster businesses
- Create structures, systems, and metrics — so the disruptive innovations that will power your firm's future growth receive the funding and personnel needed to succeed
- Create a common language of disruptive innovation — so managers can reach consensus around counterintuitive courses of action
Incisive and practical, this book helps your company take the steps necessary to benefit from disruption — instead of being eclipsed by it.
The book’s first eight chapters walk through a three-step process to spot and seize a single opportunity. The first step involves identifying opportunities for innovation. Chapter 1 provides tips and tricks to identify important, unsatisfied jobs to be done. Chapter 2 suggests a number of analyses to pinpoint overshooting. Chapter 3 describes how to spot barriers that constrain consumption. The tools and techniques in these chapters should help you pinpoint whether there is in fact an opportunity for innovation.
The second step involves formulating and shaping an opportunity to seize identified opportunities. Chapter 4 provides some thoughts about how to craft a disruptive solution. Chapter 5 introduces several analytical techniques to help assess and shape early stage, highly uncertain strategies.
The final step involves building the opportunity. Chapter 6 describes how to take ideas forward in ways that are consistent with what we call “emergent strategy.” Chapter 7 illustrates how to set up and manage teams chartered with creating disruptive growth. While we describe these steps linearly, innovators should follow them iteratively, with new insight causing teams to re-consider market opportunities and conceive of different solutions.
The book’s next three chapters describe how organizations can make the pursuit of innovation-driven growth more systematic. Chapter 8 describes how to structure for innovation. Chapter 9 provides pointers for what CEOs or other senior leaders need to do to unleash their organization’s innovative potential. Chapter 10 presents metrics and measures to help track the progress of the innovation activities.
Finally, the back of the book contains a list of Frequently Asked Questions and provides a summary of key traps that can make it hard for disruption to grow in established companies.
