Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw Quotes

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

Basically if you study entrepreneurs, there is a misnomer: People think that entrepreneurs take risk, and they get rewarded because they take risk. In reality entrepreneurs do everything they can to minimize risk. They are not interested in taking risk. They want free lunches and they go after free lunches.

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.

Innovation is critical to the heartbeat of any successful corporation in the industrialized world.

What can we learn from the battle between data and design? What can we learn from the relationship between Google and Apple? Clearly no one school of thought is right: Apple and Google are both wildly successful and profitable companies that changed the world.

At Tencent, we may be businessmen, but we are still chasing our IT, our science. We are still striving to create something really cool, trying to create things we couldn't even imagine without our new technologies. I am still clinging to this enthusiasm.

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.

You should learn from your competitor, but never copy. Copy and you die.

Many venture capitalists say they're looking for the next big idea. But they aren't, really; they're looking for something derivative, because derivative is safe.

Business has only two functions - marketing and innovation.

Innovation must lead infrastructure for a simple but compelling reason: Innovation produces new types of products and markets, and it is virtually impossible to know how to run those markets efficiently before they are created.

If companies don't think systemically enough - if they try to capture too much of the value - eventually, innovation moves somewhere else.

But Apple really beats to a different drummer. I used to say that Apple should be the Sony of this business, but in reality, I think Apple should be the Apple of this business.

When the finance or marketing people run a company, innovation stops.

I said from the very beginning, 'Yahoo should position itself as a technology innovation company, not as a media company.'

I don't invest in ideas because ideas are a dime a dozen. I could steal the idea pretty quickly.

New products, new markets, new investors, and new ways of doing things are the lifeblood of growth. And while each innovation carries potential risk, businesses that don't innovate will eventually diminish.

Visionary CEOs are product- and business-model-centric and extremely customer focused.

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

Skunk works were emblematic of corporate structures that focused on execution and devalued innovation.

EVERY MOMENT IN business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.

Whether in services or in manufacturing, the trick is to stay ahead of the curve. I believe we should not wait to be disrupted - we should become disruptors ourselves.

If you want your company to succeed, you have to have the confidence in your business to take a bet on its future - to risk destroying a mediocre business model for the chance to have a strong one.

I don't think the disruptor and the business model of a disruptor necessarily is an indication of the topography of the future. If it did, you would say then that everyone will make high-end electric cars, when the answer is clearly no.

The real competitive advantage will come to countries and companies who differentiate their offerings through education, innovation, and productivity.