Trust me I was of the opinion that attributes such as bureaucracy, poor planning, bad management or old leadership blood are the reasons for failure. Yes, they are the reasons that lead to downfall but it has much more than meets to our eye. When I studied about the failure of any organization got an interesting insight that just before the downfall started the same organization were showered with comments as greater innovators or good managed organization or futuristic organization. Then I wondered what can go so terribly wrong! After reading Innovator’s dilemma I was shocked to come to conclusion that the very good management practice, the very customer centric approach, the very efficiency we try to achieve are the reasons for the downfall of the incumbents against the disruptive innovation. I will not lie for an hour I thought my whole life was a lie….
So, I started to imagine what kind of dilemma is this, On one side you have to do everything that makes your organization a success story but on the other side the same thing is leading you to some kind of pitfall.
The key here is to understand the dilemma in depth with types of innovation that I attempted to explain: Sustaining innovation and Disruptive innovation. Sustaining innovation is something that can be predicted or forecasted accurately, needs technological advancements, requires capital and most importantly the customer more or less knows why the innovation is important. In contrast
Disruptive innovation is the one that has not developed any market boundaries, customer do not know what they want and it is mainly the off self-components assembly which has made it possible.

Major innovation in any industry is always sustaining innovation. It is the one which is required frequently by the customers and organization for survival. Majority of the improvement are on this end and incumbents have a 100% track record to stay on the top.

Disruptive innovation on the other hand is rare and is not demanded by customers. So, why should we try to focus on that? Why should we deviate our resources on it? Are the questions asked by managers daily. Even after following everything why do, we fail. The reason lies in the definition of Disruptive innovation and the value network that we work in which forces us to act in opposite direction.

What can we do to upgrade to a better position? There is an interesting analogy given in the book, when we attempted to fly, we were all failing until the principle of gravity, Bernoulli’s theorem and many other were discovered. They helped us to embrace these laws and then act accordingly. Similarly, to act for Disruptive innovation there are some unknowing forces that play in background and have enormous impact on it. It is better to understand each principle and try to embrace it!
Till then Happy reading. Enjoy your day with scratching your head while thinking on this blizzard topic of innovation.