Clayton Christensen Quotes

From a product development perspective, choosing whether a technology is disruptive at a potential moment is key.

Focusing on the long term and building a great product that is scalable ultimately leads to a great company.

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.

If I say I've got two versions of Word - that old one from 1982 that's perfect, with zero defects; or the new one that's got all this cool new stuff, but there might be a few bugs in it - people always want the new one. But I wouldn't want them to operate a plane I was on with software that happened to be the latest greatest release!

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.

Our employees and competitors thought we were docile. We want to be defiantly disruptive. I don't mean necessarily by launching price wars but by being the best at the basics - having the best customer service, the best on-time performance, the best coffee - in a thoughtful, not a testosterone-laced, way.

Innovation keeps me ahead of my competition. It means that my foes must adapt to me, not the other way around.

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.

If we're building high quality companies, if the customers like the products, if the technology innovation is real, then the substance is going to win out in the end.

The paradox explored in my book 'The Innovator's Dilemma' is that successful companies can fail by making the 'right' decisions in the wrong situations.

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

In the private sector, there is always innovation. There's always change. There's always improving productivity, and if you're not leading that, you'll be passed and ultimately go out of business. So there's an urgency to constantly update and renew and to rethink your enterprise.

Assuming a specific resource is high cost is often a path to disruption when someone makes a different assumption.

Because publishing is becoming more business-oriented each day with more examination of the bottom line, it's harder to break out than ever.

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.

Fans will come if you have a good product.

Disruptive innovation is competitive strategy for an age seized by terror.

You have to make a decision whether it's a new product or you integrate it with an existing product. It takes time to work these things out.

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.

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

Good household decision-making often relies on thinking about your household like a firm.

The level of dynamism is a matter of how fertile the country is in coming up with innovative ideas having prospects of profitability, how adept it is at identifying and nourishing the ideas with the best prospects, and how prepared it is in evaluating and trying out the new products and methods that are launched onto the market.

Innovation must lead infrastructure for a simple but compelling reason: Innovation produces new types of products and markets, and it is virtually impossible to know how to run those markets efficiently before they are created.

The only thing that scares me in the tech area is that it moves so fast that you have to be ready to invest in 20 things. Because if you just invest in one, next week, somebody has a better mousetrap, and you get taken to the cleaners.

Every time we bring someone in we ensure that they are a strategic thinker, but even more important that they understand that if the products aren't successful and the products don't sell that there won't be anything to strategize about.