Clayton Christensen Inn Quotations

Because these firms listened to their customers, invested aggressively in new technologies that would provide their customers more and better products of the sort they wanted, and because they carefully studied market trends and systematically allocated investment capital to innovations that promised the best returns, they lost their positions of leadership.

The answer is the disruptive innovator, an outsider, who creates a product or service for the non-existing consumer in a non-existing market for almost no profit.

Innovation simply isn't as unpredictable as many people think. There isn't a cookbook yet, but we're getting there.

Quite often startups were first out of the gate with a sustaining technology. But somehow the leaders got the technology and stayed atop their industries. Sometimes they acquired the startup; sometimes they just developed the technology as a follower and used their muscle and mass to win. But they always won.

Innovation almost always is not successful the first time out. You try something and it doesn't work and it takes confidence to say we haven't failed yet. Ultimately you become commercially successful.

An innovation will get traction only if it helps people get something that they're already doing in their lives done better.

Only the general manager can mold the resources, processes, and values that affect innovation , into a coherent capability to develop and launch superior new products and services repeatedly.

Motivation is the catalyzing ingredient for every successful innovation. The same is true for learning.

Disruptive innovations create jobs, efficiency innovations destroy them.

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.

Efficiency innovations arise in industries that already exist. They provide existing goods and services at much lower costs. They are not empowering. Efficiency innovators become the low cost providers within an existing framework.

Holiday Inn comes in at the bottom of the market, but they can't go upmarket except if they emulate the Four Seasons. So they can go up, but they have to emulate the people they're trying to compete against. They can't disrupt them, because there isn't anything about their model that is extendable upmarket.