Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice

by Clayton M. Christensen

As an academic, I fear we must take some of the blame. In business schools we teach myriad forms of analytics—regression, factor analysis, principal components analysis, and conjoint analysis. There are courses on marketing at the bottom of the pyramid and on marketing for not-for-profit organizations. For years, a popular course at HBS was one in which PET brain scanners showed how different advertising images affected the flow of blood in the brain. But we haven’t given students in our classrooms and managers on the front lines of innovation the right tools, forcing them to borrow and adapt tools intended for other purposes. And in spite of all this, a lot of innovation effort is ultimately assumed to be a consequence of good luck anyway. How often do you hear a success dismissed as simply the right product at the right time? We can do better than that.