A Great Listen: Clayton Christensen - Capturing the Upside

ITConversations.com has an amazing collection of IT related podcasts available, including many comprehensive sets from conferences.

One that really capured me lately was by Clayton Christensen, called “Capturing the Upside“. The link will take you to a good synopsis, but I thought I would also post a short summary of the points that were of value to me:

• A very good description of what ‘disruptive technology’ is – probably the best I’ve heard.
• Different types of disruption (e.g. new market v.s. cut-price disruption)
• Why it is so hard for new companies to compete in existing markets
• Why it can be so easy for new companies to work in new markets, and why encumbent companies will often run the other way
• What happens when features or performance exceed customer needs
• The transition from proprietary to modular and comodotised
• The resulting shift in who makes more profits when the above transition happens
• Many great examples of companies dealing with these things – some of whom fail, some of whom turn it to their advantage
• Some application of this to Open Source software

While it is predominantly tech-oriented, I would still encourage a wider audience to take a listen – the processes and market dynamics he covers apply to almost every product we encounter in everyday life and therefore is very applicable to the educational products we love and hate.