Nicholas Negroponte Quotes

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.

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.

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

If you look historically, what creates growth and wealth is innovation and investment, and increase in scale - more customers.

Most companies that are great at something - like AOL dialup or Borders bookstores - do not become great at new things people want (streaming for us) because they are afraid to hurt their initial business.

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?

But any big change is more likely to result if there is a disruptive event such as new technologies or platforms that have a surprising effect on market share.

Relative to the taxi industry, Uber is a sustaining innovation; that is, it makes customers' lives better. Uber targeted mainstream markets with a better service for existing customers, and it succeeded in serving them better than the incumbents.

Whether by design or circumstance, every startup will eventually get disrupted.

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

Invention is by its very nature disruptive. If you want to be understood at all times, then don't do anything new.

It's difficult to do something radically new, unless you are at the heart of a company.

The principles of disruptive innovation are indeed intended to be guidelines to assist managers both in introducing disruptive innovations as well as identifying disruptive developments in their market.

Leadership is happening, but it's not coming from the leaders of the old institutions. Everywhere you look, you see these extraordinary, sparkling new initiatives that are under way.

I don't feel that this concept of disruptive technology is the solution for everybody. But I think it's very important for innovators to understand what we've learned about established companies' motivation to target obvious profitable markets - and about their inability to find emerging ones. The evidence is just overwhelming.

Innovation is hard. It really is. Because most people don't get it. Remember, the automobile, the airplane, the telephone, these were all considered toys at their introduction because they had no constituency. They were too new.

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

Especially in technology, we need revolutionary change, not incremental change.

Even when early innovations start to succeed, it is not uncommon to see growing businesses sabotaged for threatening the status quo.

Sydney is a very good market for us - we have a very strong following here.

We want to make as big a market as we can with our current product.

When someone takes their existing business and tries to transform it into something else - they fail. In technology that is often the case. Look at Kodak: it was the dominant imaging company in the world. They did fabulously during the great depression, but then wiped out the shareholders because of technological change.

They're protecting an archaic industry. They should turn their attention to new models.

We started as a small newspaper company and grew by providing competition and innovation in stale, near monopolistic markets.