Page 182 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Which Model Is Right for You? 167

behavior patterns in order to fully benefit from it. Moore
advises firms to focus on customer segments for whom
the bottom-line benefits of a new way of doing business
are compelling, then work intensely with these customers
to make sure they are satisfied. Doing so leads these
customers to become references for other risk-averse
managers in adjacent industries. As the Allied powers did
on D-Day, firms need to focus their energies on securing a
small beachhead in the mainstream market and then
branching out from there.
• Clayton Christensen’s 1997 book, The Innovator’s Dilemma,
noted that established firms are often upended by
competitors that offer products that have lower
performance but are simpler, more convenient, or less
expensive. Initially, low-end customers who are
“overserved” by the market leaders adopt these products.
But often the new technical approach advances to intersect
the needs of mainstream customers. Christensen terms
these “disruptive innovations” because they undermine
the competencies and incentives perfected by the
established firm, which is ill equipped to recognize and
adjust to the threat to its core business. To rectify this, in
his 2003 follow-up book, The Innovator’s Solution,
Christensen suggests that top-level commitment and an
independent organization are the keys to adjusting to the
threat, particularly to addressing internal resistance to
transition and scaling. He also argues that businesses need
to find people with the right disposition and experience to
cope with the uncertainties of managing the early stages
of a new growth business. Christensen notes that firms
with larger numbers of relatively autonomous business
units have tended to perform better because the growth
demands of an individual unit are much smaller than the