The Innovator 's Dilemma By Clayton Christensen

Hewlett Packard (HP) decided to produce 1.3-inch disk drives to become the market leader in a new market and increase HP’s revenue. Although the market for 1.3-inch disk drives was still unclear and still developing, HP decided to organize a special team to develop this new product. This group was multi-talented, with the best engineers from every department in the company. The group also had many priorities for the company. However, things didn’t develop as the Kittyhawk team expected. They failed to sell the new product to the customer they planned. Even though some new customers were interested in this

This is an electronics company that has been in play since 1976. The name for the company was changed two times from Apple Computer, Inc. in 1976 to Apple, Inc. in 2009. This company knew that they were not the only ones in the industry, therefore they needed bright minds to work for them. The founders of this company were Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne. As sellers of consumer electronics they innovated the way to look at technology. They created computers, laptops, cellular phones, I-pads and I-pods. What made this company unique is that their teamwork had in a sense a well knowledge of paradoxical thinking. What do I mean by saying this? As the technologies advance their way of doing things must change as well. This is when paradoxical thinking comes in to action. As competitors they must use different ways of manufacturing their products, they must know what the competency is up to so they can come up with something different and unique. As the author K. R. Ravi states, “write that companies that survive are those, among other things ,that do not oppress themselves with the ‘tyranny of the OR’—the rational view that cannot easily accept paradox, that cannot live with two seemingly contradictory forces at the same time” (p.3). This is when they start thinking out of their box and not only go and with what competitors are creating, but instead use their minds to create a new device that has

Invention is the result of a long study, research, and experimentation (Innovation, n.d.); Innovation is “the discovery and the execution of pioneering ideas that create value” (Greco, 2011), in other words, new application of known concepts. A practical example of invention is the alkaline battery that provided a light-weight, small, and portable power source; innovation applied this concept to anything possible from communication devises, mecanich and construction tools, and even toys. Technical workstream leaders understand that innovators are today’s competitors reducing times, and maximazing profits with new techniques; but inventors have the potential to reshape the landscape of today’s markets leaving dominant companies out of bussiness. Who remembers door-to-door salesmen or “dear John”

Because we started out strong with creative and innovative designs in the mobile market, there was a chance we could have kept our dominant design. However, we lacked management of technological innovation because we did not keep up with the technological cycle by “birthing” new technology. We needed an innovation stream to protect our company from competitors. Instead, technological discontinuity came into play; discontinuous change overtook us with design competition and our dominant design fell behind. We fell into a technological lockout when companies like apple advanced their technology to touch screens and Google used speech-to-text features. We kept using our trackballs and keyboards. Incremental change only kept feeding our competitors improvement while we lagged.

Throughout time, many books and papers have been written to study the birthplace of leadership failure, its causes, results, and ultimately, the best way to oversea these situations to avoid future failures. Some leadership experts, may argue that the best way to learn how to lead, is to study successful leadership outcomes and more importantly, how former miscalculations were committed and as a result, what gran plan was used that resulted in the leaders turnaround success. To be a great leader, the individual has to be cognate of what elements, including external and internal impact, resulted in their failure, as well as, how to avoid leadership oversight in the future. In this paper, I will attempt to do just that, as I will incorporate the transactional and transformational leadership theory from this course and apply them to the leadership failures of one of the most entertaining leadership failures of all time: the DeLorean Motor Company.

It is very clear that it takes more than great ideas in order to stay on top in the technology arena. Competition is never ending and sometimes a company can spend more time keeping the competition away then improving on their vision. The videos “Browser Wars” and “Search” conveyed that as young upstart companies worked to get their ideas out into the marketplace.

that fail to bring the latest and greatest products to the table will fail as others succeed.

An article called “, Knowing When To Reinvent,” was composed by three company leaders, one being a CEO, to inform other company leaders about potential fault lines that have caused many companies to have downfalls. However, to prevent economic downfalls, the authors compiled a list of the downfalls and how to avoid them. Many companies have taken what seemed to be drastic measures to be successful in a changing marketplace. The thesis outlines the five fault lines within the article which are: customer needs, performance metrics, industry position, business model, and talent and capabilities (Bertolini et al., 2015).

Accordingly, “major new-product development activity was replaced by incremental product line extensions” (p.56) that resulted in a major revenue stall. The premature core abandonment cause is illustrated with the Kmart example. While the company was investing in a range of unrelated businesses searching for growth, Wal-Mart developed effective distribution and inventory systems. Kmart’s management failed to monitor and match these systems and fell far behind its rival. Hitachi’s example illustrates the talent bench shortfall. One of the leading causes of the stall was the company had executive management that lacked capabilities.

“There is no escaping change- except for death! Thus it makes good and prudent sense to learn as much as on can about the nature of change, including how to embrace it and how to maximize positive changes”(Porter_ O’Grady & Malloch,2016.p.4). It is important for a leader to understand her own philosophy of innovation and leadership to be effective in the workplace. In this course, I learned how to develop my philosophy of innovation and leadership, and how to create my own personal mission based on my ethics and core values to be effective DNP leader in the future.

Jim Collins and his research team of 20 compared and contrasted how many companies made the leap to greatness and how other companies didn’t. Based on bundles of evidence and a large quantity of data, he and his team uncovered how

With the increasing demand for innovations, many residents are growing concerned over the monopolistic motives that CEOs companies have, but there are many other positive outcomes that outweigh such a negative perspective. Tom Kelley and Jonathan Littman, former collaborators with a business company, IDEO, share their experiences through their book, The Art of Innovation. Kelley states in his book,“ The biggest single trend we’ve observed is the growing acknowledgement of innovation as a centerpiece of corporate strategies and initiatives” (3). While some workers in corporations who retain a higher position may have malicious intentions to gain control of profits,

In today’s business world, innovation is the mantra of success. For companies large and small, the big winners are those that match new, marketable ideas with customers before anyone else can. It takes flexibility and creativity and a willingness to risk. One hundred years ago, when 3M was founded as Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, the formula for business success was the same. But for 3M, perseverance mattered even more. The multiple crises that rocked 3M a century ago could have easily destroyed a young company in the 21st century.

Tidd and Bessant (2009) argued that “Unless an organization is able to move into further innovation, it risks being left behind as others take the lead in changing their offerings, their operational processes or the underlying models that drive their business”.

Johannes Gutenberg, a creator of the Renaissance, invented one of the greatest devices of all time, the printing press. Gutenberg was born in 1398 in Mainz, Germany to his parents, Friele and Else Gensfliesch. He also had two brothers. Not many people during Gutenberg’s time could read. But he was determined to be able to read. The only books back then were written by hand by monks and were very hard to come by. These books were also very expensive and would take a couple months to make. Because of this inconvenience, all books were preordered ahead of time so that the monks could have enough time to write them and get them to the person buying them when they needed the book. Gutenberg had a few other jobs before he became an