I've been trying to get a handle on what innovation is for a while, and Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen is a solid introduction to the corporate perspective. Christensen's study is based on the difference between disruptive and sustaining innovations in business, focusing primarily on hard drives but looping into backhoes and motorcycles, along with other topics.

Christensen's big result is that leading firms tend to fail when faced with disruptive innovation, losing out to new entrants. This is paradoxically the fault of 'good management', listening to customers and investing effort in improving the product. A focus on existing markets leaves the firm unable to grasp opportunities, and vulnerable to disruption from below as entrants push from marginal markets into the mainstream.

Christensen's model of resources, processes, and organizational values is a useful way of looking at how a business makes money, and his data collection is comprehensive, if narrowly focused. From a management perspective, Christensen's work is pessimistic. The only way for an firm to catch a new technology is to set up an essentially independent unit, and if it succeeds, put it at the top of the old business. I'm not sure how realistic that is right now, given the poor performance of electronics conglomerates like Sony, and the rise of cloud and hardware based silos run by Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, etc.

And finally, while I get that innovation is hard to manage and capture and economic return off of, Christensen doesn't address the larger context of what innovation is, or under what circumstances it is desirable or undesirable.

Since this is the first of May, maybe that old anti-globalization chant is right: "Disease, starvation, will not solved by corporations. That's bullshit, get off it, the enemy is profit!"