Technology in business is a growing necessity. As the years go by, the business world is leaning more and more toward it, making it almost impossible to separate the two from each other. Innovation breeds business, and since technology paves the way for it, business needs technology to sustain. It will never be the same without the advancements in technology today. All the major industries will fall into a catastrophic collapse if one takes away technology from the business since most operations and transactions involve technology. Even a startup with limited resources can aim at technology disruption by inventing an entirely different way to accomplish something. Established companies tend to focus on what they do best and pursue incremental improvements rather than revolutionary changes.
Clayton Christensen, THE INNOVATOR’S DILEMMA
Clayton Christensen is a prolific writer and author and has helped co-found multiple organizations implement his theories, and positively impact businesses and organizations worldwide. He is a Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. Merited one of the world’s top experts on innovation and growth, and his ideas influenced industries and organizations globally. In 2011, Forbes featured Clayton on a cover story and was named “the most influential business thinker.” His first book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, received the Global Business Book Award as the best business book (1997). In 2011, The Economist named it one of the six most important books about business ever written. He held five honorary doctorates, and an honorary chaired professorship at the Tsinghua University in Taiwan.
Christensen’s personal beliefs influence the way he conducts his life. He shares his views with others to know and understand him better and encourages them to lead lives of more significant commitment and purpose. He and his wife Christine live in Belmont, Massachusetts. With five children and grandparents to seven grandchildren. Christensen, known as the world’s foremost authority on “disruptive innovation.” At the age of 67, he passed on January 23, 2020, from a year-long battle with leukemia.
Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail is a profound analysis of why leading companies fail to innovate and ultimately go bankrupt in the wake of disruptive innovation. The Harvard innovation management professor distinguishes two types of technology: sustaining technologies and disruptive technologies. The sustaining technology depends on incremental improvements in the existing technology; disruptive technology is an entirely new one. Companies that succeed with disruptive technology are those new to the technology, whereas the traditional competitors triumph with sustaining technologies. Christensen draws his examples from industries and includes services, business, concepts, and products. He traces the history of disruptive and sustaining technologies in fields as diverse as earthmoving equipment, discount retail sales. Such as why did Kresge succeed in becoming K-Mart when Woolworth failed to master the new model, or why was Dayton-Hudson the only traditional department store to make the change with its Target stores, and much more.
According to Clayton Christensen, disruptive technology becomes successful because of the following:
Ryan Kulp is a marketer, musician, and self-taught developer, founder of Fomo.com, and lead instructor at MicroAcquisitions.com. He's built more than 30 web apps in his spare time and hosts a live stream series where he creates new products from scratch in a day.
Fomo is a conversion rate optimization tool designed to assist online businesses in increasing sales and conversions by utilizing customer interactions. The company’s e-commerce plugin synchronizes with store orders to showcase sales activity to online visitors in real-time, allowing businesses to convert their visitors into customers.
In addition to running Fomo.com, he has a portfolio of small apps that generate over $1.6mm per year. Before Fomo, Kulp started and failed three companies and worked as a full-time marketer and a freelancer at more than 30 venture-backed startups over five years.
― Ryan Kulp, Founder of FOMO
Fomo is also bootstrapped, except for a $150k convertible debt loan. Today, Fomo has over 5,000 paying subscribers and has made $112,000 in monthly revenue. Ryan took over a $180k company in ARR for essentially $3k. In 12 months, Fomo earned somewhere between a hundred thousand and a million bucks and paid the rest of the deal price off from profits.
His latest project, MicroAcquisitions.com, is a course on learning how to buy, grow and sell small companies with little to no money upfront. Kulp outstandingly innovated and pivoted a venture into a hundred thousand SaaS company.
The Innovator’s Dilemma is intellectually provocative and well-written. It provides a look into business thinking that was emergent during the Internet’s dawn. In conclusion, Clayton Christensen offers a profound analysis of leading companies’ dynamics.
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