Dealing with The Innovator's Dilemma

I'm reading a 2000 business bestseller called The Innovator's Dilemma by Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen.  The book is about technology innovation and, in particular, how companies succeed or fail in "disruptive" innovations.  These are the rare times when a company creates a new technology or application and then goes on to create a completely new market.  Think of the Xerox machine, the personal computer, the iPhone or the home videogame console.  I suspect that Professor Christensen wrote the book out of a passionate belief that such innovation is the fuel that drives the modern economy - and out of frustration with the fact that companies have a positively dismal track record at making it happen.

The following passage caught my eye today.

    Because failure is intrinsic to the search for initial market applications for disruptive technologies, managers need an approach very different from what they would take toward a sustaining technology...Action must be taken before careful plans are made.  Because much less can be known about what markets need or how large they can become, plans must serve a very different purpose: They must be plans for learning rather than plans for implementation.  By approaching a disruptive business with the mindset that they can't know where the market is, managers would identify what critical information about new markets is most necessary and in what sequence that information is needed...Markets for disruptive technologies often emerge from unanticipated successes, on which many planning systems do not focus.  Such discoveries often come by watching how people use products, rather than listening to what they say.

It caught my eye because this is how Intelligent Communities go about creating change.  If you read the profiles of our 2009 Top Seven Intelligent Communities, you may get the impression that they developed long-term strategies and detailed plans, then executed against those plans.  Don't be fooled.  What they had were big visions and a bias for action.  The rest they had to make up as they went along.  Their position among the Top Seven is a testament, not to superhuman foresight, but to flexibility, persistence and the ability - in the immortal words of Rudyard Kipling - to keep their heads when all about them were losing theirs.  We look forward with great pleasure to welcoming our Top Seven to New York City on May 13, and to honoring their achievements throughout our Building the Broadband Economy summit.