Asymco

Yesterday I attended the first meeting of the Forum for Growth and Innovation. It’s an initiative where practitioners of Clayton’s Christensen’s theory of innovation can review new academic research before it’s published.

The Forum has another goal: to disseminate and propagate key learnings and ideas. As a keen student of the theory and a blogger, I am eager to provide a gateway for you, my audience, to this management theory.

My modus operandi has been to discuss an industry or a set of competitors in great detail while occasionally stepping back and suggesting a cause for the patterns of behavior we are witnessing. More often than not, the causes are described very well by the theories in Christensen’s writings.

There are cases where the theory does not seem to match. That’s actually the most exciting part of this process. Exception (or anomaly) handling is what allows the theory to evolve and improve.

According to Morgan Keegan analyst Tavis McCourt Chinese consumers purchased 8 to 10 million smartphones last quarter–implying 400% growth from the 2 to 3 million last year.

How quickly things change. According to McCourt, Android now represents nearly 50 percent of smartphone volume in the country, up from zero last year. And Apple’s iOS, while a niche player with less than 500,000 iPhones sold last quarter, is ramping up quickly, thanks to the successful launch of the iPhone 4 in the country last month.

via 50 Percent of Smartphones Sold in China Last Quarter Run Android | John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThingsD.

The growth of Android is far beyond what a single company can engineer. It represents the effect of uncoordinated and uncontrolled distribution. Google does not have to market, license or write contracts for Android. It also does not necessarily benefit from this work. It enables excess device manufacturing and distribution capacity to embrace browser-enabled devices.