Steven Sinofsky Quotes

The most successful businesses have an idea for the future that's very different from the present - and that's not fully valued.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Management must take the lead in making obsolete its own products and services rather than waiting for a competitor to do so.

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.

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 great menace to the life of an industry is industrial self-complacency.

Disruption is a critical element of the evolution of technology - from the positive and negative aspects of disruption a typical pattern emerges, as new technologies come to market and subsequently take hold.

I think, particularly in our tech industry, this is an industry that has violent innovation and then commoditization, and it's a cycle of innovation/commoditization.

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

Google worries - and rightly so - about how hard it is for a big company to come up with the next hot thing.

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.

When I came into the mobile phone business, I was really the upstart who pretty much took the business, not quite by storm, but really made an impact on it quite early on. But it was from a position, really, of feeling that I was a last mover.

There's a smugness that goes with being a huge company. The big fish say, 'If it's so great, why didn't we invent it?' But how'd you like to be makin' buggy whips when cars came along?

And you know, I've had great fun turning quite a lot of different industries on their head and making sure those industries will never be the same again, because Virgin went in and took them on.

I really don't want the best people at the highest cost.

When you're a large company with significant market share, it's tempting to view market disruptions as a threat, but we view them as an opportunity.

You either innovate or you become defunct.

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

In tech communities, we consider disruption the way to lead to innovation.

Betting against entrepreneurs who are changing the world has never been a profitable endeavor.