Clayton Christensen Quotes

The paradox explored in my book 'The Innovator's Dilemma' is that successful companies can fail by making the 'right' decisions in the wrong situations.

Disruptive innovation is competitive strategy for an age seized by terror.

True disruption means threatening your existing product line and your past investments. Breakthrough products disrupt current lines of businesses.

Most companies that are great at something - like AOL dialup or Borders bookstores - do not become great at new things people want (streaming for us) because they are afraid to hurt their initial business.

Smart companies fail because they do everything right. They cater to high-profit-margin customers and ignore the low end of the market, where disruptive innovations emerge from.

In the private sector, there is always innovation. There's always change. There's always improving productivity, and if you're not leading that, you'll be passed and ultimately go out of business. So there's an urgency to constantly update and renew and to rethink your enterprise.

The most essential thing for us was to get the business model right, then put the world-class technology under it to support it. At Merrill, that meant not doing what people expected.

It's important to remember that innovators in business don't always get a platform.

Assuming a specific resource is high cost is often a path to disruption when someone makes a different assumption.

Companies cannot really see beyond their current customer base. They explicitly or implicitly do things to protect their current customers. And the last person to want real change is your customer. This is why most new ideas come from small companies that have nothing to lose.

I think Microsoft will have to change. I think that the business of Microsoft, the company of Microsoft, is going to continue to succeed. But I think the business model of Microsoft is going to have to change.

From a product development perspective, choosing whether a technology is disruptive at a potential moment is key.

Fact is, inventing an innovative business model is often mostly a matter of serendipity.

As an owner, you have a choice. Do you want to adopt a vision that you think is real sharp and real cutting edge and could get you from good to great - has a chance - or do you want to just say the organization is not about that, and we're not going to try to adopt a new coaching philosophy and vision.

As a traditionally risk-averse nation, India has rarely been at the forefront of innovation. Indian companies have mostly imitated others and became very good at it.

I don't feel that this concept of disruptive technology is the solution for everybody. But I think it's very important for innovators to understand what we've learned about established companies' motivation to target obvious profitable markets - and about their inability to find emerging ones. The evidence is just overwhelming.

Business has only two functions - marketing and innovation.

There's this famous observation that I totally believe: Great startup ideas are the ones that lie in the intersection of the Venn diagram of 'is a good idea' and 'looks like a bad idea.' So you want most people to think it's a bad idea and thus not compete with you until you get giant. But for it to secretly be good.

A disruptive innovation is a technologically simple innovation in the form of a product, service, or business model that takes root in a tier of the market that is unattractive to the established leaders in an industry.

When someone takes their existing business and tries to transform it into something else - they fail. In technology that is often the case. Look at Kodak: it was the dominant imaging company in the world. They did fabulously during the great depression, but then wiped out the shareholders because of technological change.

… people who have built a business doing it the old way think it would be better if things could be more stable for longer periods of time. But you have to remember, new inventions are not inherently disruptive. Invention is only disruptive if customers say, “Hey, I like this better than the old way”.

The stock market clearly values companies that can deliver disruptive innovation.

Innovation means taking risks, and that is where the private sector can play a role.

Set your business plan to win; raise the bar or you're not going to be prepared. You need to think that what you're doing will make you $100 million.