The Innovator's Dilemma Quotes

“In contrast, investing time and energy in your relationship with your spouse and children typically doesn’t offer that same immediate sense of achievement. Kids misbehave every day. It’s really not until 20 years down the road that you can put your hands on your hips and say, “I raised a good son or a good daughter.” You can neglect your relationship with your spouse, and on a day-to-day basis, it doesn’t seem as if things are deteriorating. People who are driven to excel have this unconscious propensity to underinvest in their families and overinvest in their careers—even though intimate and loving relationships with their families are the most powerful and enduring source of happiness.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma with Award-Winning Harvard Business Review Article ?How Will You Measure Your Life??

“Disruptive technologies typically enable new markets to emerge.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

“The reason is that good management itself was the root cause. Managers played the game the way it was supposed to be played. The very decision-making and resource-allocation processes that are key to the success of established companies are the very processes that reject disruptive technologies: listening carefully to customers; tracking competitors’ actions carefully; and investing resources to design and build higher-performance, higher-quality products that will yield greater profit. These are the reasons why great firms stumbled or failed when confronted with disruptive technological change.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

“disruptive technology should be framed as a marketing challenge, not a technological one.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

“First, disruptive products are simpler and cheaper; they generally promise lower margins, not greater profits. Second, disruptive technologies typically are first commercialized in emerging or insignificant markets. And third, leading firms’ most profitable customers generally don’t want, and indeed initially can’t use, products based on disruptive technologies.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

“To succeed consistently, good managers need to be skilled not just in choosing, training, and motivating the right people for the right job, but in choosing, building, and preparing the right organization for the job as well.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

“Three classes of factors affect what an organization can and cannot do: its resources, its processes, and its values.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

“When commercializing disruptive technologies, they found or developed new markets that valued the attributes of the disruptive products, rather than search for a technological breakthrough so that the disruptive product could compete as a sustaining technology in mainstream markets.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

“The techniques that worked so extraordinarily well when applied to sustaining technologies, however, clearly failed badly when applied to markets or applications that did not yet exist.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

“An organization’s capabilities reside in two places. The first is in its processes—the methods by which people have learned to transform inputs of labor, energy, materials, information, cash, and technology into outputs of higher value. The second is in the organization’s values, which are the criteria that managers and employees in the organization use when making prioritization decisions.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

“With few exceptions, the only instances in which mainstream firms have successfully established a timely position in a disruptive technology were those in which the firms’ managers set up an autonomous organization charged with building a new and independent business around the disruptive technology.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

“This is one of the innovator’s dilemmas: Blindly following the maxim that good managers should keep close to their customers can sometimes be a fatal mistake.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

“First, disruptive products are simpler and cheaper; they generally promise lower margins, not greater profits. Second, disruptive technologies typically are first commercialized in emerging or insignificant markets. And third, leading firms’ most profitable customers generally don’t want, and indeed initially can’t use, products based on disruptive technologies. By and large, a disruptive technology is initially embraced by the least profitable customers in a market. Hence, most companies with a practiced discipline of listening to their best customers and identifying new products that promise greater profitability and growth are rarely able to build a case for investing in disruptive technologies until it is too late.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

“Sound managerial decisions are at the very root of their impending fall from industry leadership.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

“Watching how customers actually use a product provides much more reliable information than can be gleaned from a verbal interview or a focus group.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma with Award-Winning Harvard Business Review Article ?How Will You Measure Your Life??

“They must be plans for learning rather than plans for implementation. By approaching a disruptive business with the mindset that they can’t know where the market is, managers would identify what critical information about new markets is most necessary and in what sequence that information is needed.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

“If good management practice drives the failure of successful firms faced with disruptive technological change, then the usual answers to companies, problems—planning better, working harder, becoming more customer- driven, and taking a longer-term perspective—all exacerbate the problem.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

“Disruptive technologies bring to a market a very different value proposition than had been available previously. Generally, disruptive technologies underperform established products in mainstream markets. But they have other features that a few fringe (and generally new) customers value. Products based on disruptive technologies are typically cheaper, simpler, smaller, and, frequently, more convenient to use. There”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

“They must be plans for learning rather than plans for implementation.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

“It is very difficult for a company whose cost structure is tailored to compete in high-end markets to be profitable in low-end markets as well.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

“At a more serious level, the desirability of aligning our actions with the more powerful laws of nature, society, and psychology, in order to lead a productive life, is a central theme in many works, particularly the ancient Chinese classic, Tao te Ching.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

“But differentiation loses its meaning when the features and functionality have exceeded what the market demands.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

“As successful companies mature, employees gradually come to assume that the priorities they have learned to accept, and the ways of doing things and methods of making decisions that they have employed so successfully, are the right way to work. Once members of the organization begin to adopt ways of working and criteria for making decisions by assumption, rather than by conscious decision, then those processes and values come to constitute the organization’s culture. 7 As companies grow from a few employees to hundreds and thousands, the challenge of getting all employees to agree on what needs to be done and how it should be done so that the right jobs are done repeatedly and consistently can be daunting for even the best managers. Culture is a powerful management tool in these situations. Culture enables employees to act autonomously and causes them to act consistently. Hence, the location of the”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

“Will flash cards invade the disk drive makers’ core markets and supplant magnetic memory? If they do, what will happen to the disk drive makers? Will they stay atop their markets, catching this new technological wave? Or will they be driven out?”
― Clayton Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma: Meeting the Challenge of Disruptive Change

“in their efforts to provide better products than their competitors and earn higher prices and margins, suppliers often “overshoot” their market: They give customers more than they need or ultimately are willing to pay for.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

“In general, the successful entrants accepted the capabilities of hydraulics technology in the 1940s and 1950s as a given and cultivated new market applications in which the technology, as it existed, could create value. And as a general rule, the established firms saw the situation the other way around: They took the market’s needs as the given. They consequently sought to adapt or improve the technology in ways that would allow them to market the new technology to their existing customers as a sustaining improvement. The established firms steadfastly focused their innovative investments on their customers. Subsequent chapters will show that this strategic choice is present in most instances of disruptive innovation. Consistently, established firms attempt to push the technology into their established markets, while the successful entrants find a new market that values the technology.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

“The theory posits that in the early stages of a technology, the rate of progress in performance will be relatively slow. As the technology becomes better understood, controlled, and diffused, the rate of technological improvement will accelerate. 12 But in its mature stages, the technology will asymptotically approach a natural or physical limit such that ever greater periods of time or inputs of engineering effort will be required to achieve improvements. Figure 2.5 illustrates the resulting pattern.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

“established firms tend to be good at improving what they have long been good at doing, and that entrant firms seem better suited for exploiting radically new technologies, often because they import the technology into one industry from another, where they had already developed and practiced it.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

“on—the value network framework would predict that firms similar to Quantum and Seagate are not likely to build market-leading positions in flash memory. This is not because the technology is too difficult or their organizational structures impede effective development, but because their resources will become absorbed in fighting for and defending larger chunks of business in the mainstream disk drive value networks in which they currently make their money.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

“They planned to fail early and inexpensively in the search for the market for a disruptive technology. They found that their markets generally coalesced through an iterative process of trial, learning, and trial again.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail