Clayton Christensen Commercial Enterprises Summary
This assignment points out who Clayton Christensen is and what are his main findings in the area of innovation management in commercial enterprises. This text is divided in four parts. First, an introduction of the person Clayton Christensen with some background information about his career. The second part outlines his major work of disruptive innovation. Based on this theory he made some suggestions how to deal with this type of innovation, which will be discussed in the fourth part. A brief summary and a personal statement will end up this paper.
Clayton M. Christensen is a Business Administration professor at Harvard Business School. He has a joint appointment in the technology and operations management and general management faculty group. …show more content…
Therefore at a specific point the product performance exceeds the market need. As far as customers agree that the money they spend for a product is an overall good investment it works out. But if the feeling rises that part of the product is not worth to pay for, they look for alternatives. At that point a disruptive innovation, as described before, has the possibility to get a foothold in the market by offering a product which is cheaper and serves the basic needs of the customer. A current example is the shift from normal fixed line phones to internet services like Skype. More and more customers are not satisfied with the rising prices of telecommunication services argued through a wider range of services. A lot of these services like video calls offered through telephone companies are not important for their customers. Therefore they look for alternatives that offer a smaller range of services for less the price of a fixed line service. In this case Skype is a disruptive innovation that is in a niche market since ten years but gets its foothold in the main telecommunication market through the fact that competitors overshoot their customer needs (Anthony 2007). Many examples are known where established market leader lost their leading position to unknown small competitors through a disruptive innovation. Christensen especially focuses on the disc drive industry in the United States. In his studies he unveiled why many established companies fail to invest in disruptive
Clayton M. Christensen is a Business Administration professor at Harvard Business School. He has a joint appointment in the technology and operations management and general management faculty group. …show more content…
Therefore at a specific point the product performance exceeds the market need. As far as customers agree that the money they spend for a product is an overall good investment it works out. But if the feeling rises that part of the product is not worth to pay for, they look for alternatives. At that point a disruptive innovation, as described before, has the possibility to get a foothold in the market by offering a product which is cheaper and serves the basic needs of the customer. A current example is the shift from normal fixed line phones to internet services like Skype. More and more customers are not satisfied with the rising prices of telecommunication services argued through a wider range of services. A lot of these services like video calls offered through telephone companies are not important for their customers. Therefore they look for alternatives that offer a smaller range of services for less the price of a fixed line service. In this case Skype is a disruptive innovation that is in a niche market since ten years but gets its foothold in the main telecommunication market through the fact that competitors overshoot their customer needs (Anthony 2007). Many examples are known where established market leader lost their leading position to unknown small competitors through a disruptive innovation. Christensen especially focuses on the disc drive industry in the United States. In his studies he unveiled why many established companies fail to invest in disruptive