The Innovator's Dilemma, a concept and book popularized by Clayton Christensen, is essentially the idea that companies often have trouble innovating in the ways they need to because they lack the resources, internal business processes, and value system to succeed at innovating. For instance, part of the reason Microsoft has not had much success in establishing a true web-based brand and business model is because it is experiencing the innovator's dilemma: the company's resources and internal business processes are all geared towards software development, and its value system is to incentivize revenue via software sales. To put it simply, its got the wrong environment for true Internet innovation.

With Google's recent foray into ecommerce (see Google Video and Google Base), has the company somehow escaped the innovator's dilemma? Ecommerce requires different resources (fraud protection, customer service), different processes (working with suppliers, establishing shipping protocols), and different value systems (revenue via a percentage of transaction as opposed to revenue via advertising).

It may be too early to say for sure, but the fact that Google has so quickly been able to roll out a quickly growing video store and a promising P2P ecommerce store without compromising its advertising business suggests that the company may have escaped the innovator's dilemma.

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