Gartner Group interviews Clayton Christensen

I just came across this interview with Clayton Christensen out on the Gartner Group website. The Gartner Fellows: Clayton Christensen's Interview Part 1 It appears to be publicly available.

I think most everyone interested in high tech marketing and innovation knows that Dr. Christensen is the author of two of the best business books of the past ten years: The Innovator's Dilemma and The Innovator's Solution. This interview has some interesting discussion of a few of the concepts from his books, esp. The Innovator's Solution. I think the discussion of market segmentation that takes up the last one third or so of the interview is particularly useful as it expands on one of the core ideas in The Innovator's Solution - the concept that we don't set out to buy a particular product or service, we set out to hire someone (a product or service) to do jobs that we have to accomplish.

Christensen's concept of hiring a product to do a job is very nicely put and builds on prior work by people going back at least to Harvard professor Ted Leavitt whose work, including the classic Marketing Myopia, talked about how people don't want a drill, they want holes. In the interview Christensen talks a little about why it's so hard for companies to put the concept of hiring products for jobs into practice. He also discusses a couple of techniques that can help marketers and others adopt this perspective. Good insightful stuff wrapped around a couple of very actionable techniques.