Bookshelf: The Innovator's Guide To Growth: Putting Disruptive Innovation To Work

July 11, 2008

By Scott D. Anthony, Mark W. Johnson, Joseph V. Sinfield and Elizabeth J. Altman, forward by Clayton M. Christensen, Harvard Business Press, 2008, 320 pages, $35.00

John Teresko

More than a decade ago Clayton Christensen's book, The Innovator's Dilemma, illustrated how disruptive innovations drive industry transformation and market creation. Christensen's research demonstrated how growth-seeking incumbents must simultaneously maintain their core business, deflect disruptive attacks and seize disruptive opportunities.

In this new book, the authors take the subject to the next level -- implementation. They explain how to create this crucial capability for unlocking disruption's transformational power. Examples include Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Pepsi, Intel, Motorola, SAP and Cisco Systems. The intent is to show management how to leverage that transformational power. Examples include how to:

Identify potential innovation opportunities -- by understanding evolving problems of customers and consumers.

Formulate and shape ideas -- by using past patterns of success and failure to assess and refine ideas.

Build an innovation business -- by developing a plan to take a promising idea forward and assembling and managing a team to initiate early-stage activities, by maximizing an uncertain idea's chances of success and by empowering teams to work on disruptive ideas.

Build innovation capabilities -- by institutionalizing the innovation process in a way that makes the pursuit of growth repeatable and even routine and by ensuring that a company's internal structures and processes and its external interactions support its efforts to create new growth businesses.

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