Clayton Christensen Quotes

Pure innovation is more gross than error.

I tried a dozen different modifications that were rejected. But they all served as a path to the final design.

Airplanes were invented by natural selection. Now you can say that intelligent design designs our airplanes of today, but there was no intelligent design really designing those early airplanes. There were probably at least 30,000 different things tried, and when they crash and kill the pilot, don't try that again.

Failure in Innovation - it's a price worth paying.

The personal computer was a disruptive innovation relative to the mainframe because it enabled even a poor fool like me to have a computer and use it, and it was enabled by the development of the micro processor. The micro processor made it so simple to design and build a computer that IB could throw in together in a garage. And so, you have that simplifying technology as a part of every disruptive innovation. It then becomes an innovation when the technology is embedded in a different business model that can take the simplified solution to the market in a cost-effective way.

Every single industry is going through a major business model and technology oriented disruption.

Apple is a unique company in that the art and the science sit together very nicely. There's an appreciation for both sides of the brain.

What I believe is that Nintendo is a very unique company because it does its business by designing and introducing people to hardware and software - by integrating them, we can be unique.

I haven't studied art and I haven't studied typography, but I've still gone out and done it.

For the first time, the best may err, art may persuade, and novelty spread out its charms. The first fault is the child of simplicity; but every other the offspring of guilt.

Half of art is accident, but there is no accident without free experiment.

None of my inventions came by accident. I see a worthwhile need to be met and I make trial after trial until it comes. What it boils down to is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration.

A new idea is rarely born like Venus attended by graces. More commonly it's modeled of baling wire and acne. More commonly it wheezes and tips over.

There is no way to find the best design except to try out as many designs as possible and discard the failures.

Arts and sciences are not cast in a mould, but are found and perfected by degrees, by often handling and polishing.

Invention is arrived at by intelligent stumbling.

Engineering is a great profession. There is the satisfaction of watching a figment of the imagination emerge through the aid of science to a plan on paper. Then it moves to realization in stone or metal or energy. Then it brings homes to men or women. Then it elevates the standard of living and adds to the comforts of life. This is the engineer's high privilege.

None of us understand what we're doing, but we do beautiful things anyway.

My main theme is the extension of the nervous system in the electric age, and thus, the complete break with five thousand years of mechanical technology. This I state over and over again. I do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant.

I think the Macintosh was created by a group of people who felt that ah there wasn't a strict vision between sort of science and art.

Exactly 5,126 attempts to make the first bagless vacuum cleaner were failures-some catastrophic disappointments, some minor defects. It took 15 years. Prototype 5,127 was the success ... Failure is painful, but it spurs on improvement like nothing else.

It's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.

First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII — and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we've realized it's a brochure.

A lot of it's experimental, spontaneous. It's about knocking about in the studio and bumping into things.