*A Book Review*
Seeing What's Next
By Clayton M. Christensen, Scott D. Anthony and Erik A. Roth
by Michael C. Gray
January 3, 2025
How can you tell whether a company is positioned to exploit a competitive advantage from an innovation?
Clayton M. Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School, explored why successful companies are unseated by disruptive innovations and a process innovators can use to successfully launch disruptions in his other books, The Innovator's Dilemma and The Innovator's Solution.
In Seeing What's Next, Christensen and his associates apply the theories in those books to predict how the future might unfold in an industry to make better investment and management decisions.
They examine case histories of the aviation, education, semiconductor and telecommunication industries to extract how the industries developed and existing companies were disrupted, such as Western Union (telegraph) by AT&T (telephone).
One factor they discuss is the critical role nonindustry players, such as government through regulations and investment in research, can have in how innovations develop and the competitive environment. For example, for many years, government regulations gave AT&T a virtual monopoly for long-distance telephone service.
An opening can be created when a major player, such as Western Union, thinks an innovation is too small to invest in and is a distraction from its principal business. For example, telephone service initially was limited to customers located close together, and Western Union's telegraph service had national coverage with large accounts, like news agencies and securities brokerage companies. Western Union's management thought the telephone was a toy.
Some customers may be underserved - the available products might not solve their problems.
Others might be overserved - available products might have features that a group of customers doesn't value and doesn't use. They might be satisfied with a stripped-down, good-enough product.
An innovation analyst must be able to observe customer problems and how receptive leading companies are to change. The analyst must study financial reports and the research activities in a company to find out a company's innovative efforts. Remember how Steve Jobs visited Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center and saw a prototype of a mouse that, with design modifications, became the interface for the Macintosh computer?
Although Seeing What's Next was published during 2004, the theories and principles explained in the book are still relevant today. Although it is rather rough sledding to read, the book includes tables and charts, with a summary at the end of each chapter, to make it digestible.
Business owners and managers should study Seeing What's Next to learn how to identify opportunities for innovation and what their potential future competition might be.
Buy it on Amazon: Seeing What's Next: Using Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change.
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