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

"Seeing what's next" is not one of those books that predict the future and try to come up with what will arrive in the next x years ahead. Instead, it describes the steps, theories and tools you can use in order to get ahead of the curve about what the next disruptive innovations will be, where they will come from and whether or not they'll have a chance to survive. Building on the theories explained in "The Innovator's Dilemma" (Christensen's first book) and "The Innovator's Solution (the sequel that followed), this book presents the results and resume of the most important points in those books and develops the theory and questions to ask to predict where the next big change (disruption) will happen. If you have read the two books mentioned, this one will allow you to consolidate the concepts and ideas but I don't think it will add too much new content. If you haven't read them (as it was my case) you'll find yourself a bit lost sometimes at the begining of the book, but thanks to the examples later on and a very good Summary chapter at the end, I think I won't read those now.The book is divided in two parts:- Chapters 1 to 4 describe how to analyze the current status of an industry looking for signals of a new disruption (big change/leap forward) that might occur. It also shows how to evaluate the current players and how they could react to it, and finally how strategic decisions and external market conditions affect those disruptions- Chapters 5 to 10 provide examples of applying the above theories and methods to different industries: healthcare, education, aviation, telecommunication, etcI enjoyed reading this book quite a lot and learn also quite many things that, even though the book was written in 2004, I think are prefectly applicable today. I read (and re-read) the first part as I didn't read the previous two books from this author. After understanding the ideas, I went to the second part but only reading the chapters about the industries I care the most: Telecommunication and Semiconductors. If at some point I'm faced with projects or work on one of the others, I'll make sure I have this book at hand, as it provides insights and tools to evaluate the current state and even have some ground to jump into the near future. I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in how companies innovate and develop their products and services and why then sometimes disruptive ideas come and become a huge success. It will also make you think about your customers and how they behave the way they do when confronting innovation.

"Seeing What's Next" is the third book in a series, following "The Innovators Dilemma" and "The innovators Solution". The Innovators Dilemma was excellent, but the Innovators Solution was weak (see my amazon review). So, it was hard to know what to expect of "Seeing What's Next," all I knew is that it was a major business book 10 years ago and that I had avoided reading it till now. Well... I think I wouldn't have minded if I would have avoided it a bit longer. It doesn't add much to the previous books and wasn't great reading. It suffered from the same problems as the Innovators Solution."Seeing What's Next" consists of 2 parts. The first part introduces a couple of techniques to evaluate companies disruptive potential (based on the theory developed in the Innovators Dilemma and the Innovators Solution). The second part uses these tools to analyze six industries: 1) Education, 2) Airlines, 3) Microprocessors, 4) Healthcare, 5) Countries, and 6) Telecom.The first part consists of 3+1 chapters. The first 3 chapters provide a 3-step evaluation method to see whether a company has the potential to disrupt another company. The steps are: 1) What signs are there that change is possible, 2) How do the summary of the companies look like, 3) What strategic decisions did the company make. The first chapter summarizes the previous 2 books. The second chapter explains how to quickly evaluate a company based on the theory-techniques used in the previous books and the third looks at the decisions that management has made related to the potentially disruptive change. The fourth chapter looks at the influence of government on all of this.The second part goes over different case studies. How will remote learning disrupt educational institutes. Will airlines be disrupted? What is the future of Intel and other chip makers? What does disruption look like in healthcare? How can we use the theory for deciding national government strategy? And the last case study related to the telecom industry. Now, *that* chapter was most interesting to me as I worked in the telecom industry for about 15 years now. So, I figured that I could say something about the analyzes done. In my opinion, it is quite a mess, the analysis that is (also the industry, but that is a different thing). Technology-wise the authors make a mess by confusing IP with VOIP and missing the history of package-switched systems (e.g. complaining about its reliability, whereas the technology was developed for the purpose of reliability). Also, the author is completely missing the point about how innovation and inventions have been created in the industry. But the worst of all, the authors completely miss out the role of the equipment manufacturers and only focus on the role of the network operators. In my opinion, a big mistake. It is also no surprise that the predictions are mostly false (at least, as far as the last 10 years). In fact, I wouldn't draw the conclusion that the "theory" can help predict disruptive change, but my conclusion would be more than in-depth knowledge is a prerequisite of predicting anything.That also leads me to something that bothered me the whole book (and also the Innovators Solution), which is the book builds up a "theory" which 'managers' (it seems from authors perspective there are only managers in companies) can use to predict disruption and that way avoid its pitfalls. The problem though... theory must be based on certain assumptions, such as... how do companies work? The authors never clarify their assumptions about the world that forms the basis of their 'theory' so we must figure it out based on their 'theory' and how they describe it. I can't say what these assumptions are, but, especially the assumptions about companies feel very very traditional and extremely manager-focused. They do not match with my experiences at all.But my favorite part of the book must be how the authors write a whole book about using theory to "See Whats Next." They argue we need to use theory instead of history, because history mostly 'predicts' the past but not the future. Then they end the book with this quote "Indeed, the telecommunications industry has historically seen waves of disruptive innovations that in other contexts might have systematically changes the structure of the industry ... nothing has fundamentally reshaped the industry since the introduction of the telephone". I don't know how to interpret that, but it weakens the whole books premise.I would not recommend reading this book.

Another great work by Clayton M. Christensen for those interested in Innovation.

If you want to bring innovation in your industry through a visionary change then this book is a treat.The author has a number of case studies of industries from aviation to health care where the author illustrate the power of visionary change in the industry.

Die inhaltliche Thematik habe meine Vor-Rezensenten schon erläutert, ich möchte hier lieber schnell auf ein paar andere Punkte eingehen.Ich fand das theoretische Modell mit "Signals of Change", "Competitive Battles" und "Strategic Choices" sowie die Ideen der "Disruption" (natürlich schon in vorherigen Büchern von Herrn Christensen erläutert) sowie "low-end customers und "non-consuming customers" einfach .. eben erfrischend.Viele Entwicklungen (s. Smartphone Markt etc.) lassen sich dadurch erklären. Hier kommen wir nun aber auch zum großen Manko solcher "Big Stragety" Bücher: Man muss sich fragen, inwiefern sich eine Handlungsorientierung nach dem Lesen ergibt. Erkennt man dadurch wirklich besser Trends? Kann ich darauf mein Geschäft aufbauen oder verbessern? Auch wenn man vielleicht zu einem leichten "ja" nach Christensens Buch geneigt ist, stellt man doch schnell fest, dass zu viele Nebenfaktoren viel wichtiger sind als das Wissen um "Seeing what's next" - wie z.B. technisches Know-how, Teams, Kooperation, Kreativität etc.Meiner Meinung nach sorgt das Buch eher für eine ex-post Erklärung, gibt aber im Vergleich zu Büchern über die vorherigen Punkte weniger Innovationsanreize.Für den Studenten von "Strategic Management" oder ähnlich Interessierte definitiv lesenswert, eines der durchdachteren Modelle auf dem Markt.

This book drives you through the steps of innovation and disruption , clearly shows the difference to follow from the incumbents and entrants point of view . Clearly tied to Innovators solutions and innovators dilemma and clarifying concepts.Recomendable to undestand more clearly the rules to follow if you are an incumbents or a disruptor.

Excellent book - good to read after going through the author's previous works.