Clayton Christensen Disruptive Quotations

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.

A disruptive innovation is a technologically simple innovation in the form of a product, service, or business model that takes root in a tier of the market that is unattractive to the established leaders in an industry.

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.

We have found that companies need to speak a common language because some of the suggested ways to harness disruptive innovation are seemingly counterintuitive. If companies don't have that common language, it is hard for them to come to consensus on a counterintuitive course of action.

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.

The mistake that makes launching a venture expensive is when you try to make a disruptive technology so good that it can compete on a quality basis with an established product.

Smart companies fail because they do everything right. They cater to high-profit-margin customers and ignore the low end of the market, where disruptive innovations emerge from.

The principles of disruptive innovation are indeed intended to be guidelines to assist managers both in introducing disruptive innovations as well as identifying disruptive developments in their market.