I liked Innovator's Dilemma quite a bit. Most economic historians consider Christiansen's original study of disk drives in the 1980s a weak foundation for theor

I liked Innovator's Dilemma quite a bit. Most economic historians consider Christiansen's original study of disk drives in the 1980s a weak foundation for theorizing. Even so, there are useful insights like the tendency for companies to move up in established markets and hence miss emerging, initially lower-value markets. Anybody who has seen how sales works in a large enterprise will recognize this pattern. That said it seems to me that Innovators Dilemma neglects an even simpler reason for company failure: many corporate bureaucracies simply aren't very responsive to external economic signals because career success is only distantly related to market success. This is one of the reasons that companies run by decisive, technically oriented founders often seem to do better than their more corporate peers. It's easier to turn the ship to deal with something like the Internet if the company is driven by somebody who feels the change in their gut. p.s., Anybody else like the New Yorker writing style? The dismantling of university innovation was pretty funny.