The Innovator's Dilemma

The Innovator's Dilemma

Author: Clayton M. Christensen

Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press

Published: 2013-10-22

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 1422197581

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Named one of 100 Leadership & Success Books to Read in a Lifetime by Amazon Editors An innovation classic. From Steve Jobs to Jeff Bezos, Clay Christensen’s work continues to underpin today’s most innovative leaders and organizations. The bestselling classic on disruptive innovation, by renowned author Clayton M. Christensen. His work is cited by the world’s best-known thought leaders, from Steve Jobs to Malcolm Gladwell. In this classic bestseller—one of the most influential business books of all time—innovation expert Clayton Christensen shows how even the most outstanding companies can do everything right—yet still lose market leadership. Christensen explains why most companies miss out on new waves of innovation. No matter the industry, he says, a successful company with established products will get pushed aside unless managers know how and when to abandon traditional business practices. Offering both successes and failures from leading companies as a guide, The Innovator’s Dilemma gives you a set of rules for capitalizing on the phenomenon of disruptive innovation. Sharp, cogent, and provocative—and consistently noted as one of the most valuable business ideas of all time—The Innovator’s Dilemma is the book no manager, leader, or entrepreneur should be without.


Science and Corporate Strategy

Science and Corporate Strategy

Author: David A. Hounshell

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1988-10-28

Total Pages: 776

ISBN-13: 9780521327671

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This book provides a comprehensive, critical study of research and development in a large US corporation.


Thomas Edison: Success and Innovation through Failure

Thomas Edison: Success and Innovation through Failure

Author: Ian Wills

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-01-01

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 3030299406

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This book develops a systematic approach to the role of failure in innovation, using the laboratory notebooks of America's most successful inventor, Thomas Edison. It argues that Edison's active pursuit of failure and innovative uses of failure as a tool were crucial to his success. From this the author argues that not only should we expect innovations to fail but that there are good reasons to want them to fail. Using Edison's laboratory notebooks, written as he worked and before he knew the outcome we see the many false starts, wrong directions and failures that he worked through on his way to producing revolutionary inventions. While Edison's strengths in exploiting failure made him the icon of American inventors, they could also be liabilities when he moved from one field to another. Not only is this book of value to readers with an interest in the history of technology and American invention, its insights are important to those who seek to innovate and to those who employ and finance them.


The Innovator's Dilemma

The Innovator's Dilemma

Author: Clayton M. Christensen

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 0060521996

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An analysis of the new business paradigm shows how firms that do "everything right" can nevertheless fail because of new technologies and disruptions in the market structure.


The Power of Failure

The Power of Failure

Author: Fran Tarkenton

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2015-09-14

Total Pages: 122

ISBN-13: 1621574369

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So says Hall of Fame quarterback and hugely successful serial entrepreneur Fran Tarkenton. Don’t get him wrong—there’s no one more competitive or keener on winning than Fran. But in his inspiring and insightful new book, The Power of Failure, Tarkenton illustrates with hard, real-life examples why the most successful entrepreneurs are those with the courage, the resilience, the intelligence, and the competitive spirit to fail often, fail faster, and fail better—to achieve ultimate success. Candid, concise, quotable, and realistic, Fran Tarkenton is the best possible guide to finding success through the power of failure.


Why Startups Fail

Why Startups Fail

Author: Tom Eisenmann

Publisher: Currency

Published: 2021-03-30

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 0593137027

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If you want your startup to succeed, you need to understand why startups fail. “Whether you’re a first-time founder or looking to bring innovation into a corporate environment, Why Startups Fail is essential reading.”—Eric Ries, founder and CEO, LTSE, and New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Startup and The Startup Way Why do startups fail? That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn’t answer it. So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail, Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures. • Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder’s talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly. • False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to “fail fast” and to “launch before you’re ready,” founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions. • False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand. • Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to “get big fast,” hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures. • Help Wanted. Rapidly scaling startups need lots of capital and talent, but they can make mistakes that leave them suddenly in short supply of both. • Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong. Drawing on fascinating stories of ventures that failed to fulfill their early promise—from a home-furnishings retailer to a concierge dog-walking service, from a dating app to the inventor of a sophisticated social robot, from a fashion brand to a startup deploying a vast network of charging stations for electric vehicles—Eisenmann offers frameworks for detecting when a venture is vulnerable to these patterns, along with a wealth of strategies and tactics for avoiding them. A must-read for founders at any stage of their entrepreneurial journey, Why Startups Fail is not merely a guide to preventing failure but also a roadmap charting the path to startup success.


The Innovator's Solution

The Innovator's Solution

Author: Clayton

Publisher: Harvard Business Press

Published: 2013-10-22

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1422196585

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An innovation classic. From Steve Jobs to Jeff Bezos, Clay Christensen’s work continues to underpin today’s most innovative leaders and organizations. A seminal work on disruption—for everyone confronting the growth paradox. For readers of the bestselling The Innovator’s Dilemma—and beyond—this definitive work will help anyone trying to transform their business right now. In The Innovator’s Solution, Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor expand on the idea of disruption, explaining how companies can and should become disruptors themselves. This classic work shows just how timely and relevant these ideas continue to be in today’s hyper-accelerated business environment. Christensen and Raynor give advice on the business decisions crucial to achieving truly disruptive growth and propose guidelines for developing your own disruptive growth engine. The authors identify the forces that cause managers to make bad decisions as they package and shape new ideas—and offer new frameworks to help create the right conditions, at the right time, for a disruption to succeed. This is a must-read for all senior managers and business leaders responsible for innovation and growth, as well as members of their teams. Based on in-depth research and theories tested in hundreds of companies across many industries, The Innovator’s Solution is a necessary addition to any innovation library—and an essential read for entrepreneurs and business builders worldwide.


Invention and Innovation

Invention and Innovation

Author: Vaclav Smil

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2023-02-14

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 0262374250

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From the New York Times-bestselling author, a new volume on the history of human ingenuity—and its attendant breakthroughs and busts. The world is never finished catching up with Vaclav Smil. In his latest and perhaps most readable book, Invention and Innovation, the prolific author—a favorite of Bill Gates—pens an insightful and fact-filled jaunt through the history of human invention. Impatient with the hype that so often accompanies innovation, Smil offers in this book a clear-eyed corrective to the overpromises that accompany everything from new cures for diseases to AI. He reminds us that even after we go quite far along the invention-development-application trajectory, we may never get anything real to deploy. Or worse, even after we have succeeded by introducing an invention, its future may be marked by underperformance, disappointment, demise, or outright harm. Drawing on his vast breadth of scientific and historical knowledge, Smil explains the difference between invention and innovation. He then looks at three different types of inventions. Inventions that failed to dominate as promised: Airships Nuclear fission Supersonic flight Inventions that turned disastrous: Leaded gasoline DDT Chlorofluorocarbons Inventions we have long been promised (and that would be highly beneficial): Travel in vacuum (hyperloop) Nitrogen-fixing cereals Nuclear fusion Finally, he offers a “wish list” of inventions that we most urgently need to confront the staggering challenges of the twenty-first century. Filled with engaging examples and pragmatic approaches, this book is a sobering account of the folly that so often attends human ingenuity—and how we can, and must, better align our expectations with reality.


The Idea Factory

The Idea Factory

Author: Jon Gertner

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2012-03-15

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 1101561084

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The definitive history of America’s greatest incubator of innovation and the birthplace of some of the 20th century’s most influential technologies “Filled with colorful characters and inspiring lessons . . . The Idea Factory explores one of the most critical issues of our time: What causes innovation?” —Walter Isaacson, The New York Times Book Review “Compelling . . . Gertner's book offers fascinating evidence for those seeking to understand how a society should best invest its research resources.” —The Wall Street Journal From its beginnings in the 1920s until its demise in the 1980s, Bell Labs-officially, the research and development wing of AT&T-was the biggest, and arguably the best, laboratory for new ideas in the world. From the transistor to the laser, from digital communications to cellular telephony, it's hard to find an aspect of modern life that hasn't been touched by Bell Labs. In The Idea Factory, Jon Gertner traces the origins of some of the twentieth century's most important inventions and delivers a riveting and heretofore untold chapter of American history. At its heart this is a story about the life and work of a small group of brilliant and eccentric men-Mervin Kelly, Bill Shockley, Claude Shannon, John Pierce, and Bill Baker-who spent their careers at Bell Labs. Today, when the drive to invent has become a mantra, Bell Labs offers us a way to enrich our understanding of the challenges and solutions to technological innovation. Here, after all, was where the foundational ideas on the management of innovation were born.