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Clayton Christensen Quotes

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Clayton M. Christensen is an esteemed professor known for his contributions to the fields of business management and innovation. Born on April 6, 1952, he is a professor at Harvard Business School and the author of 'The Innovator's Dilemma'.

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Famous Clayton Christensen Quotes

“Only the general manager can mold the resources, processes, and values that affect innovation , into a coherent capability to develop and launch superior new products and services repeatedly.”

Values Process Products Resources Innovation Superiors Managers Capability Mold New Products General Manager

Book:Innovation and the General Manager

Source: Innovation and the General Manager

“An innovation will get traction only if it helps people get something that they're already doing in their lives done better.”

People Ifs Done Helping Innovation Traction

Author:Clayton Christensen

“Efficiency innovations provide return on investment in 12-18 months. Empowering innovations take 5-10 years to yield a return. We have ample capital - oceans of capital - that is being reinvested into efficiency innovation.”

Years Months Return Ocean Innovation Investment Empowering Yield Efficiency Return On Investment

Author:Clayton Christensen

“Because these firms listened to their customers, invested aggressively in new technologies that would provide their customers more and better products of the sort they wanted, and because they carefully studied market trends and systematically allocated investment capital to innovations that promised the best returns, they lost their positions of leadership.”

Wanted Lost Technology Position Products Return Innovation Investment Customers Firm Trends New Technology

Book:The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

Source: The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

“Year after year after year, people write books about managing innovation or about leadership, for example, without ever going through the pain of saying, "This kind of leadership will cause this result in these circumstances and a very different result in those circumstances." This is academic malpractice of the worst kind.”

People Writing Years Kind Book Different Pain Causes Results Worst Example Circumstances Innovation Academic Malpractice

Author:Clayton Christensen

“The reason why it is so difficult for existing firms to capitalize on disruptive innovations is that their processes and their business model that make them good at the existing business actually make them bad at competing for the disruption. Companies in fact are specifically organized to under-invest in disruptive innovations! This is one reason why we often suggest that companies set up separate teams or groups to commercialize disruptive innovations. When disruptive innovations have to fight with other innovations for resources, they tend to lose out.”

Reason Fighting Difficult Team Innovation Firm Competing

Author:Clayton Christensen

“We have found that companies need to speak a common language, because some of the suggested ways to harness disruptive innovation are seemingly counter-intuitive. If companies don't have that common language, it is hard for them to come to consensus on a counter-intuitive course of action.”

Action Speak Language Common Innovation Consensus

Author:Clayton Christensen

“Most companies think of disruption as a threat. But disruptive innovations have tremendous growth potential. If incumbent companies can learn how to harness the forces of disruption, they too can improve their ability to create new-growth businesses.”

Thinking Growth Ability Innovation Threat

Author:Clayton Christensen

“People still cling to this belief that innovation is just random and unpredictable. But if you look closely, there are some real patterns. The companies that recognize and take advantage of those patterns have the real opportunity to create competitive advantage.”

People Real Opportunity Belief Innovation Unpredictable

Author:Clayton Christensen

“If a company truly wants to resolve the innovator's dilemma, it does need to be able to create wave after wave of disruptive innovation. And those disruptive innovations will typically grow to the point where they do cause some pain for leading companies. But most disruptive innovations create substantial new growth before they cause that pain.”

Pain Growth Innovation Wave Resolve Dilemma

Author:Clayton Christensen

“In general, the questions that are on our mind are the same questions that have been driving our work over the past decade. How do we bring order to this messy, unpredictable world of innovation? How can we dramatically improve the chances of creating a successful new-growth business? How can we do this again and again? More specifically, it has become very clear that the fundamental paradigms of market segmentation and branding are badly broken - and we're working on developing more useful theories for these dimensions of innovation.”

World Mind Past Chance Successful Broken Innovation Driving Branding Unpredictable Messy Paradigm Over The Past

Author:Clayton Christensen

“At the beginning of almost every industry, the available products and services are so expensive to own and complicated to use that only people with a lot of money and a lot of skill have access to them. A disruptive technology is an innovation that simplifies the product and makes it so affordable that a whole new population of people can now have one and use it at the beginning for simple applications, and then it improves to the point that it makes the old technology obsolete.”

People Simple Technology Innovation Complicated Application Simplify Affordable

Author:Clayton Christensen

“Every disruptive innovation is powered by a simplifying technology, and then the technology has to get embedded in a different kind of a business model. The first two decades of digital computing were characterized by the huge mainframe computers that filled a whole room, and they had to be operated by PhD Computer Scientists. It took the engineers at IBM about four years to design these mainframe computers because there were no rules. It was an intuitive art and just by trial and error and experimentation they would evolve to a computer that worked.”

Kind Art Different Technology Design Computer Scientist Innovation Evolve Different Kinds Experimentation Embedded Ibm

Author:Clayton Christensen

“The personal computer was a disruptive innovation relative to the mainframe because it enabled even a poor fool like me to have a computer and use it, and it was enabled by the development of the micro processor. The micro processor made it so simple to design and build a computer that IB could throw in together in a garage. And so, you have that simplifying technology as a part of every disruptive innovation. It then becomes an innovation when the technology is embedded in a different business model that can take the simplified solution to the market in a cost-effective way.”

Different Together Simple Poor Technology Design Fool Computer Solutions Innovation Relative Garage Embedded

Author:Clayton Christensen

“The innovations are far more important because the technology itself has now way to impact the world for good until it's embedded in the business model. Innovation it's the combination of the simplifying technology and the business model.”

World Important Technology Innovation Embedded

Author:Clayton Christensen

“Generally, the technology that enables disruption is developed in the companies that are the practitioners of the original technology. That's where the understanding of the technology first comes together. They usually can't commercialize the technology because they have to couple it with the business model innovation, and because they tend to try to take all of their technologies to market through their original business model, somebody else just picks up the technology and changes the world through the business model innovation.”

World Trying Together Understanding Technology Couple Innovation Changing The World

Author:Clayton Christensen

“Motivation is the catalyzing ingredient for every successful innovation. The same is true for learning.”

Motivation Successful Growing Innovation Ingredients

Book:Disrupting Class, Expanded Edition: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns

Source: Disrupting Class, Expanded Edition: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns

“Disruptive innovations create jobs, efficiency innovations destroy them.”

Jobs Innovation Efficiency Disruptive Disruptive Innovation

Author:Clayton Christensen

“Innovation almost always is not successful the first time out. You try something and it doesn't work and it takes confidence to say we haven't failed yet. Ultimately you become commercially successful.”

Trying Firsts Successful Havens First Time Innovation

Author:Clayton Christensen

“Innovation simply isn't as unpredictable as many people think. There isn't a cookbook yet, but we're getting there.”

People Thinking Innovation Unpredictable Cookbook

Author:Clayton Christensen

“The answer is the disruptive innovator, an outsider, who creates a product or service for the non-existing consumer in a non-existing market for almost no profit.”

Answers Products Innovation Profit Consumers Outsiders Innovators Disruptive

Author:Clayton Christensen