I just read “Seeing What’s Next” by Clayton M. Christensen, Scott D. Anthony, Erik A. Roth. (LOC, Amazon)
I’m gonna have to come back to this one a few times, and maybe check out the authors’ other books.
This book covered a serious hole in my informal (and my short formal) economic education. As absolutely important as innovation is in the grand economic scheme, I hadn’t yet read anyone trying to put a formal framework around it. Of course, there’s always going to be that ineffable core in the process that gives us a reason to call it ‘innovation’ rather than ‘just what one would expect’, but there are meaningful things to be said about how a innovation is accepted into a market or markets, and ways to predict who will take greatest advantage of the innovation in a business sense. That’s what this book addresses, and from my first read through it, it seems like the theories presented and their applications have some solidity.
The fact that my economic education is rather limited didn’t seem to be much of a hindrance to my reading this book; the ideas are presented in a way that doesn’t require much there. I’m sure the combination of these ideas with a more complete understanding of economics would be more powerful.
I haven’t yet tried to take their theories and apply them to something on my own, and I don’t necessarily feel like that’s going to be easy without their extensive experience and/or the benefit of hindsight. And of course, a theory isn’t much of a theory if it can’t work beyond those boundaries. But it’s far too early to tell whether there’s a lack in the book or in me that’s at the heart of my uncertainty there.
In any case, I think this is a great read in that I gained a bit of a foothold in understanding some of the most important and complex economic events out there, not to mention a couple concrete ideas about where to place some of my intellectual effort in the near future.