Seeing What's Next: Using the Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change

Products based on disruptive technologies are typically cheaper, simpler, smaller, and, frequently, more convenient to use.

The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen. Christensen wrote that great companies fail not because they want to avoid disruptive change but because they are reluctant to embrace promising new markets that might undermine their traditional businesses and that do not appear to satisfy their short-term growth requirements.

These successful practitioners have in common their apparent understanding—whether explicit or intuitive—of both their customers’ trajectories of need and their own technologists’ trajectories of supply. Understanding these trajectories is the key to their success thus far. But the list of firms that have consistently done this is disturbingly shor

Analyze recent and likely future changes for each force.

One of the best ways to probe whether you can trust the advice that a theory is offering you is to look for anomalies—something that the theory cannot explain.