Clayton Christensen Quotes

The Internet is disrupting every media industry...people can complain about that, but complaining is not a strategy. And Amazon is not happening to book selling, the future is happening to book selling.

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.

… people who have built a business doing it the old way think it would be better if things could be more stable for longer periods of time. But you have to remember, new inventions are not inherently disruptive. Invention is only disruptive if customers say, “Hey, I like this better than the old way”.

We love serious technology innovations, and there is a strong bias towards large technology innovations that are sort of disruptive to the current market.

Technology, through automation and artificial intelligence, is definitely one of the most disruptive sources.

Some of the most innocuous inventions have proven earth-shattering, with reverberations felt around the planet. The Internet is the poster child for disruptive technology, but even such inventions as Amazon's Kindle and Apple's iPod have rocked their respective industries by changing how we entertain ourselves.

Today, companies have to radically revolutionize themselves every few years just to stay relevant. That's because technology and the Internet have transformed the business landscape forever. The fast-paced digital age has accelerated the need for companies to become agile.

Washington is an incumbent protection machine. Technology is fundamentally disruptive.

Customer expectations? Nonsense. No customer ever asked for the electric light, the pneumatic tire, the VCR, or the CD. All customer expectations are only what you and your competitor have led him to expect. He knows nothing else.

Whether it's steamships disrupted by the railroads or railroads disrupted by the airlines, it's typically the large entrenched incumbents that are displaced by innovators.

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.

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.

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.

As a global disrupter, Uber is no stranger to conflict, and its instinct has always been pugilistic.

This is the age of disruption.

In a world of global competition and new technology, I think competition is coming from new places.

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

Retail is undergoing a massive change, and there is a chance for new leaders to emerge and older brands to reinvent themselves.

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.

I want to be in an industry where the upstarts can grow and displace the incumbents, because that's why there's so much innovation.

When a technology, regardless of how different and difficult it is, sustains the trajectory of performance improvement, my research asserts that the leaders in the prior generation of technology are likely to end up on top of their industry at the end of the transition.

Don’t just think about the technology available today, but the technology that would be 10 times better in the future.

The primary thing that any technology startup must do is build a product that's at least 10 times better at doing something than the current prevailing way of doing that thing. Two or three times better will not be good enough to get people to switch to the new thing fast enough or in large enough volume to matter.

Technology by default became the thing that was a new thing that had swept in and was altering it everything.

Smart technologies are not just disruptive; they can also preserve the status quo. Revolutionary in theory, they are often reactionary in practice.