Clayton Christensen Quotes

When the finance or marketing people run a company, innovation stops.

For me, the winning strategy in any start-up business is, 'Think big but start small.'

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

Basically if you study entrepreneurs, there is a misnomer: People think that entrepreneurs take risk, and they get rewarded because they take risk. In reality entrepreneurs do everything they can to minimize risk. They are not interested in taking risk. They want free lunches and they go after free lunches.

Fact is, inventing an innovative business model is often mostly a matter of serendipity.

As we continue to grow, the question is, how do you keep the company as innovative as it was 15 employees ago?

Business has only two functions - marketing and innovation.

Companies, in fact, are specifically organized to under-invest in disruptive innovations! This is one reason why we often suggest that companies set up separate teams or groups to commercialize disruptive innovations. When disruptive innovations have to fight with other innovations for resources, they tend to lose out.

To turn really interesting ideas and fledgling technologies into a company that can continue to innovate for years, it requires a lot of disciplines.

Entrepreneurs are moving from a world of problem-solving to a world of problem-finding. The very best ones are able to uncover problems people didn't realize that they had.

I see business as an ecosystem.

You need to run the company on an even keel, and you need to be thinking about the company long-term and how to drive your next innovation.

I am good at conceptualizing and building institutions.

As businesses grow, all sorts of things that once were done on the fly - including creating new products - have a way of becoming bureaucratized.

I have talked about the 'fractal organization'. Those smaller pieces should innovate and lead the rest of the organization. There will be parts that will be thinking about technologies of the future, and you need to nourish them.

There are no more holes in my management lineup.

I've certainly seen R&D groups, typically funded by large corporations, where they bring together a lot of smart people and nothing happens. And the reason nothing happens is that they don't have a clear goal.

Organize as much as possible around teams, to achieve enhanced focus, task orientation, innovativeness, and individual commitment.

Innovative efforts should never report to line managers charged with responsibility for ongoing operations. The new project is an infant and will remain one for the foreseeable future, and infants belong in the nursery. The 'adults', that is, the executives in charge of existing businesses or products will have neither the time nor understanding for the infant.

I'm a very big believer that the primary focus for any organization at any point in time should always be smarter, better, faster.

A structured design approach can heighten the hit rate in the fuzzy front end of innovation processes in public and private sectors.

As a company grows, things get stuck at the top. It can be a bottleneck.

Can a label group by itself scale to make a sensible business? I don't think so.

The most important job of an entrepreneur is to design the business before there is a business.

There are companies that are good at improving what they're already doing. There are companies that are good at extending what they're doing. And finally there are companies that are good at innovation. Every large company has to be able to do all three - improve, extend, and innovate - simultaneously.