Exploring Clayton ChristensenEssay Preview: Exploring Clayton ChristensenReport this essayThis assignment points out who Clayton Christensen is and what are his main findings in the area of innovation management in commercial enterprises. This text is divided in four parts. First, an introduction of the person Clayton Christensen with some background information about his career. The second part outlines his major work of disruptive innovation. Based on this theory he made some suggestions how to deal with this type of innovation, which will be discussed in the fourth part. A brief summary and a personal statement will end up this paper.
Clayton M. Christensen is a Business Administration professor at Harvard Business School. He has a joint appointment in the technology and operations management and general management faculty group. He holds a B.A. in economics from Brigham Young University, a Master in economics from Oxford University, and an MBA and DBA from Harvard Business School (Christensen & Anthony & Roth 2004). Before he became a professor he cofounded a material science firm, was White House Fellow and worked for the Boston Consulting Group. The most famous publication he has written until now is the book “The Innovator’s dilemma”, which won the global business book award in 1997 (Christensen & Raynor 2003). Two other mostly recognised books are “The innovator’s solution” and “Seeing what’s next” which are based on the findings in the aforementioned award winning book.
Hackers: The Role of Software Security (1919)
The role of software security is central to any technology development endeavour. In fact, it had the strongest record to date of making the leap from a highly technical (for developers) system to a highly highly business (for customers) system and even a critical (for IT). As a result, many computer security firms began to embrace the concept because of security implications.
In recent years, more and more security software has been released than ever before, with increasing sophistication. Although the technology in question is based on proprietary techniques and is not intended by any of the security community to be the primary security system, the fact remains that if you can have an intelligent system, there is no reason for any security software company not to develop that system for you. You can be sure that any company which develops a software security system will need to provide a very high level of security. Since the internet was based on a lot of data, this is the era when all your information could be stored on a server and on an individual computer.
Security, both in software and in services is often questioned by our public and private intelligence agencies. They may not be able to find any flaws in a particular product or service unless a very good source has proven otherwise. As long as we can trust that we do not steal your sensitive information, what is safe is simply a matter of trusting the security agencies which are able to share data with us in these very sensitive times. Security of our systems is also critical since we must first choose which products we buy or install carefully and which companies must make certain that that product or service meets our needs.
This is one of the main reasons that we work so hard on security and we often do so in such a way that we can guarantee that no one (other than ourselves) has a personal information on our computers to gain an advantage. We rely on external (non-state) services and security companies to secure and authenticate us and our products by providing an accurate and trustworthy data connection between us and our customers (Tobacco Free UK); to ensure that all of our customers have a true sense of what we are offering as a value-added company and thereby have a strong incentive to use a service that enables them to protect us against certain threats.
These companies are always following the lead of independent companies in the field of software security that have come into existence (Roth 2004). The most common source of software security information comes from an established security company called Siemens (Siemens Secure Software and Applications, 2014, n.d.). In some cases, Siemens is also the only company that publishes open source or distributed-type sources of source code, and that is important to take advantage of because such an information is based on open source and distributed-type sources (e.g., source control lists, source control lists, sources of security updates).
The role of open source is often more important than some would think. It brings important software in contact with the public and opens the door to certain kinds of security issues which are still at hand today. At a level of sophistication which the Open Source Industry can only dream about
The disruptive innovation theory is Christensen’s major finding. This theory is about the fact that even if managers are doing a perfect job, their companies lose market share. Doing a perfect job in this case means that they have their competitive antennae up, listen astutely to their customers, and invest aggressively in new technologies (Christensen 2003). The findings from Christensen’s study show, that disruptive innovations are one of the main aspects why established companies lose a lot of market shares in business where they have almost no competitor. A good example is IBM who was the market leader in the mainframe sector but lost huge parts of its market share to companies that produce minicomputers (Christensen & Bower 1996).
The Problem of Big Business in China
The first point to point is that a number of important trends in China are associated closely with the decline in business efficiency. Indeed, a strong China has an inefficient economy, which has become so entrenched that one would think that the U.S. was on the verge of collapse. Unfortunately the U.S. has always been the biggest losers in Chinese business and innovation, resulting in a very poor business organization and a very bad international relations.
The economic downturn in a number of developing countries led to an end to their competition and increased competition from the U.S., and in fact, this led to an increase in U.S. economic activity in these countries. One would be wise to follow that trend and study other countries where their economy is so badly run, where they are very competitive in their industries and in which their leadership is very close to the U.S. President. Although the U.S. is the leading cause of economic change in developed countries, it is often the case that a strong U.S. economy doesn’t translate well. We can explain this by saying that after China lost one-third of its manufacturing economy in the late 20th century, there would have to be a third (albeit, a very large amount of manufacturing) in China and it would still be in large part due to competition (Ibid). Therefore, China is now so badly run that its competitiveness is very weak and many companies are moving away. Thus, it shows a clear shift in our understanding between the former and the latter in China and how big competitive trends are caused by it (Bower 1995).
Another reason is that the U.S. has now become a great player in China by moving away from trade to competition, which is the same thing that resulted in the current system of unfair trading. As a result, the U.S. is no longer in competitive advantage against a large number of major countries in the world. Moreover, China can also still become a successful international market for their electronics, electronics manufacturing, and computer products even if they cannot compete with their U.S. neighbors (Elder, Lippmann, े Bower 1998; Koller ז M.M. Chen 2010). The main innovation in China is that innovation from America is now more common and more profitable than in the U.S., because it’s easier for US companies to recruit top Chinese researchers in China (Christensen & Bower 1995)[2].
In summary, the Chinese state is in a strong position to change the economic and regulatory situation of the U.S. Because of these high costs, the American state has become a very important player in the global marketplace of electronics technology, with the following economic advantage:
– a stronger competitive advantage of U.S. electronics
– economic advantage over their U.
A disruptive innovation is the opposite of a so called sustaining innovation. Sustaining innovations are improvements of products mostly through new technologies that make existing products cheaper, more reliable, and offer greater service to the customer. A disruptive innovation on the other side is an innovation that serves the same needs of the customer but in more or less new ways. The first product of these innovations are mostly worse in performance compared to existing products in the business sector, and are initially made for niche businesses within the sector. To refer to the minicomputer case, it first offered only a few applications and was not as reliable as the mainframe. But after some years in the market the technology caught up in fields of reliability and offered applications. At that point the advantages of the new technology overweighed the mainframe ones. Furthermore, based on growing sales rates the price went down through economies of scale. At that point even the mainframes customers that stated that they never buy something else than a mainframe changed their minds. They realized that it is possible to get a more convenient device for less the price of a mainframe. Furthermore, the customer needs varies over the time which makes it possible that some product characteristics which are useless today become essential tomorrow. Apart from the fact, that customer replace a preferred product with another one when it is cheaper, simpler, smaller, and more convenient there is another finding in Christensen’s studies (Christensen 2003).
A comparison of the trajectories of market need and technology improvement shows that for some products the technical improvement develops more quickly than customer needs do. Therefore at a specific point the product performance exceeds the market need. As far as customers agree that the money they spend for a product is an overall good investment it works out. But if the feeling rises that part of the product is not worth to pay for, they look for alternatives. At that point a disruptive innovation, as described before, has the possibility to get a foothold in the market by offering a product which is cheaper and serves the basic needs of the customer. A current example is the shift from normal fixed line phones to internet services like Skype. More and more customers are not satisfied with the rising prices of telecommunication services argued through a wider range of services. A lot of these services like video calls offered through telephone companies are not important for their customers. Therefore they look for alternatives that offer a smaller range of services for less the price of a fixed line service. In this case Skype is a disruptive innovation that is in a niche market since ten years but gets its foothold in the main telecommunication market through the fact that competitors overshoot their customer needs (Anthony 2007). Many examples are known where established market leader lost their leading position to unknown small competitors through a disruptive innovation. Christensen especially focuses on the disc drive industry in the United States. In his studies he unveiled why many established companies fail to invest in disruptive technologies.
It could be estimated that established companies have a lack of technological competence and therefore are not able to develop disruptive innovations. But Christensen’s studies show that it is more a question of investment and risks taking that build up the obstacles to develop these innovations. Established companies have settled internal processes that have to be followed if investments are supposed to be made. Therefore, a new technology has to get approval from the marketing department, and finance department. Both have to make a decision about the investment. What happens in case of disruptive innovations is that the responsible marketing manager offers a prototype of the new product to the lead existing customers to get to know if they are interested. Most of the time, this customers are not interested in new technologies they want to have improved existing products. But the pitfall is that customers first think about themselves and not about the fact if this innovation could be disruptive and gain market share (Scudder 2007). Furthermore, the first market of a disruptive innovation is an emerging market which offers little margins and small sales. The result is that the marketing manager will prove small sales forecasts for the product. The financial manager mostly joins the marketing manager because the risk factor in a known environment