…Clay Christensen followed up the big question posed in 1997s Innovator’s Dilemma with the Innovator’s Solution book. The answer took six years and a co-author. And 292 pages. The only problem was that the Solution wasn’t really any kind of solution at all. Which, I guess, is a pity. Except for the fact it probably sold more copies than the question book, so Christensen and Raynor probably didn’t mind too much.

The irony in this story is that if either of them had bothered to check out TRIZ they could’ve answered the Dilemma question and saved themselves 100,000 words worth of going around in circles. Albeit the circles were both entertaining and eminently readable.

If you don’t know where the future disruptors are going to come from or what their solution is going to look like, 292 pages of not very meaningful text is probably about par for the course. But the TRIZ Trends give us some very clear descriptions of what the future solutions will look like. If you’re making, say, band-aids, the Dynamisation Trend alone will tell you that the future is liquids, gases and fields:

Very likely in that order. The existence of these kinds of roadmap offer the plastic-strip-based incumbents all the useful future-proofing directions for their business:

1. if they’re lazy and in possession of below-average morality and ethics, they could simply patent the liquid, gas and field-based solutions. The only downside of this (aside from perhaps not being able to sleep at night at the thought they were using the patent system to do the precise opposite of what it was intended to do) is they may have to conduct some insurance-policy type research in order to be able to demonstrate to the Patent Examiner that their novel solutions are ‘manufacturable by one skilled in the art’. Beyond that, the patents would then ensure ~20 years of protection against any meaningful disruption. By which time it would in any event be likely that there would be a new set of leaders in place, hopefully one or two of which would have raised their moral standards a tad.
2. if they’re lazy and in possession of already higher than average moral standards, they could patent the same TRIZ-derived solutions and then, rather than sitting on them for 20 years, they could look to license them to a friendly new-entrant. They would then let this new entrant play the Innovator’s Dilemma game up until the point where the new solution is starting to take away valuable customers, and then allow the incumbent to buy them. Ideally using a pre-determined arrangement agreed upon at the time of the initial license contract.
3. If they’re not lazy, possess good moral standards and a decent level of Innovation Capability Maturity (Level 3 or above), they could develop the disruptive ‘inferior’ new solution themselves. Most likely using a separate-from-the-main-business SkunkWorks type development arrangement and then launching under a different brand name, gradually then managing the retirement of the old technology and fully transitioning to the new.

Seems fairly straightforward. The (TRIZ) Innovator’s Solution in 500 words or less. The only problem now is that the knowledge won’t earn me nearly as much in royalty payments or client engagements as the none-TRIZ version did for the esteemed Professor Christensen. Which, now I think about it, sounds like a really important contradiction to go work on…