TechNook

Harvard Business Professor Clayton Christensen’s signature book, “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” first appeared in 1997. The Dilemma is that corporations, once innovative on their rise, eventually seek to just protect the technology they already sell in the marketplace, and thus look ahead only with an incremental mindset. If you need a well-known example of such a decline, it is that of the typewriter industry. Christensen’s lead-off example is the disc drive industry. He used it because it presented him, at the time, with a manageable 30 years of tangible advances, as disc drives shrank in size from 14” in diameter (who remembers that?) to 8” to 5 ¾” to 3 ½” and so on. It’s a story of outsiders, with each size reduction, overwhelming established companies, leapfrogging them because of …