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The Innovator's Manifesto
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The Innovator's Manifesto

Deliberate Disruption for Transformational Growth

Michael E. Raynor
Crown, 2011
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Editorial Rating

9

Recommendation

Most new businesses fail, even when their products seem rich with possibilities. You can’t really predict which companies will succeed or explain why the failures die, or at least you couldn’t without this genuinely exciting book. Management consultant Michael E. Raynor offers a theoretical framework – the “Disruption Theory” – that will help you improve your predictions about which businesses will work and which will not. This theory explains how innovative offerings can dislodge leading standards. Raynor previously collaborated with disruption theory’s originator, Clayton M. Christensen, with whom he co-wrote The Innovator’s Solution. Raynor’s approach isn’t flawless, and his writing is a bit clunky, but his content is very useful. He explains why you want to understand the theory of disruption, how you can benefit from applying it, and how empirical evidence – a rare asset for a business theory – supports its ideas. getAbstract recommends this intriguing, illuminating report to investors, to readers who follow Christensen’s work, and to entrepreneurs who want a clearer view of their companies’ potential.

Summary

What Is “Disruption Theory?”

Disruption theory explains how innovations triumph and how they displace existing market leaders. To understand how it works, it helps to know that a market theory can be “explanatory” and describe why something happens, or it can be “predictive” and try to forecast what will happen, even without making any particular claims about being true. You cannot test an explanatory theory since it is designed to “address a fixed and unchanging past.” But you can test a predictive theory by using experimentation. You define a situation, predict an outcome and follow the results. You can strictly control this process, as in a physics lab, or just observe it, perhaps by watching as a new business either succeeds or fails in a given market.

Disruption theory offers more accurate than you might expect “predictive power” about which new businesses may work and which ones may not. This theory can help entrepreneurs hone their plans, investors guide their buys, executives select acquisition targets and managers assess potentially disruptive outside innovation.

Corporate strategists can apply disruption theory without extensive research into other ...

About the Author

Michael E. Raynor is a director at Deloitte Consulting and the author of The Strategy Paradox. He co-wrote The Innovator’s Solution with Clayton M. Christensen.

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