Clayton Christensen Quotes

Create something, sell it, make it better, sell it some more and then create something that obsoletes what you used to make.

The problem with entrepreneurship is we are often working really hard producing high quality products that no-one wants. The creation of stuff is not valued.

Our line of business structure has served us very well in the past, when customer segments and product requirements were very distinct.

The top principle for disruptive and sustaining innovation is that it has to have a laser focus on customers. Innovation begins with their needs and expectations.

The business model is both the starting point and the scorecard for Customer Development progress.

New things get noticed. This means you can't be afraid to present something new to your market, even if it's just a variation or an addition to an already-existing product or service.

Any dispassionate observer would recognize that on Day One, a start-up has no customers, and unless the founder is a true domain expert, he or she can only guess about the customer, problem, and business model.

Not all startups are alike. One of the key ways they differ is in the relationship between a startup's new product and its market.

When you improve your product so it does the customer's job better, then you gain market share.

It's easier to build a business around a first-class product, even if it's a more expensive product to produce.

When we look at investing, we always think about 'how defensible is this, how likely is it that somebody is going to copy this.' E-commerce tends to be something easy to copy because it's execution.

During the early stages of an industry, when the functionality and reliability of a product isn't yet adequate to meet customer's needs, a proprietary solution is almost always the right solution - because it allows you to knit all the pieces together in an optimized way.

I learnt the hard way about positioning in business, about catering to the right segments.

Every startup should address a real and demonstrated need in the world - if you build a solution to a problem lots of people have, it's so easy to sell your product to the world.

If you make a really good product that people want and are willing to pay for, money will come.

We all need to become more customer-focused and recognize the power of marketing to sell more diamonds.

When an entrant competitor attacks the low end of any market, the rational reaction of the incumbent firms is to abandon rather than defend it - because the low end is the least profitable of their possible investments.

The marketers can compete with free; it just has to be better. Look at bottled water if you don't believe me.

We need to reengineer companies to focus on figuring out who the customer is, what's the market and what kind of product you should build.

Whatever business you're in - it doesn't matter - it's going to commoditize over time. It's going to devalue. You've got to keep moving it to a higher value.

The purpose of a business is to create customers.

... whatever business you're in, it doesn't matter, it's going to commoditize over time, it's going to devalue, you've got to keep moving it to a higher value. Keep going to a higher value in whatever it is that you do and force yourself and force the organization to always do it ahead of time

A true entrepreneurial enterprise begins with a big idea - a unique way to solve a customer's problem. Your customer, after all, is the only justification for creating a company in the first place. Without a big, transformational idea, you can't produce a great result for your customer.

'Product life' is measured in months, not years, and as soon as you introduce a 'product,' understand that others in your business are going to reverse engineer it to duplicate the results after they circumnavigate the patents, the trademarks, and the intellectual property.

The enterprise market is never winner-take-all.