Clayton Christensen Quotes

If you want to be promoted into the first league of carmakers, then you can't just follow suit.

In software and many other online markets, even dominant firms face potential threats because of the low costs for competitors to enter those markets. Threats more easily emerge because of better or newer technologies leapfrogging older ones.

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.

Your innovation can create new winners and losers; or at the very least, make existing companies look fresh and innovative by partnering with you. Everyone wants to align with market makers.

Pretty much, Apple and Dell are the only ones in this industry making money. They make it by being Wal-Mart. We make it by innovation.

The leader of the market today may not necessarily be the leader tomorrow.

You've got to figure out how you're going to come in and significantly impact and redefine a market such that you become a market share leader in it.

You know, IBM was almost knocked out of the box by other types of computer software and manufacturing.

In a globalized world, one application can spread like wildfire and there's only one winning company, which means you have to invest more than you've ever had.

The trick is, a market has to be nonexistent when you start. If the market is large early on, you will have too many competitors. You have to make it large.

It's very difficult in the technology space when you have been leapfrogged to prosper again.

Except in very narrow cases, where there's breakthrough science that needs patent production, worrying about competitors is a waste of time. If you can't out iterate someone who is trying to copy you, you're toast anyway.

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

History is replete with examples of tech firms that were marginalized by new companies and technologies.

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

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.

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.

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

The U.S. market has the highest priority for Volkswagen.

Advertising is the price companies pay for being unoriginal.

People are going to copy your product if you build great stuff. Just because Yahoo has a search box doesn't make it Google.

Our view is that just because Amazon can disrupt somebody else's profit stream, it doesn't mean that Amazon earns that profit stream.

Tesla has defied everyone's predictions again and again. It has such a unique position in the market, and so far, whatever people think about Tesla and its business model, there is one fact that nobody can dispute: It pretty much has the market to itself.

I think the rise of A.I. is bigger than the rise of mobile. Large companies are sometimes as worried about startups as startups are about large companies. Ultimately, it will be about who delivers the best service or product.

The second you get set in your ways is the second a newer, fresher, more innovative company is going to come in and take your market share.