Clayton Christensen
The Innovator's Dilemma
“Why is success so difficult to sustain?” (Location 81)
Tags: pink
Note: This question led to writing this book
“Is successful innovation really as unpredictable as the data suggests?” (Location 82)
Tags: pink
Note: Second question
strategist at the Boston Consulting Group, (Location 82)
Tags: pink
doctoral student (Location 85)
Tags: pink
What often causes this lagging behind are two principles of good management taught in business schools: that you should always listen to and respond to the needs of your best customers, and that you should focus investments on those innovations that promise the highest returns. (Location 91)
Tags: pink
The great historian of science, Thomas Kuhn, taught us that the key to improving any theory is to surface anomalies—events or phenomena that the theory cannot explain. It is only by seeking to account for outliers—exceptions to the theory—that researchers can improve the theory. (Location 137)
Tags: blue
One theme common to all of these failures, however, is that the decisions that led to failure were made when the leaders in question were widely regarded as among the best companies in the world. (Location 201)
Tags: pink
there is something about the way decisions get made in successful organizations that sows the seeds of eventual failure. (Location 206)
Tags: pink
What this implies at a deeper level is that many of what are now widely accepted principles of good management are, in fact, only situationally appropriate. (Location 211)
Tags: pink
There are times at which it is right not to listen to customers, right to invest in developing lower-performance products that promise lower margins, and right to aggressively pursue small, rather than substantial, markets. (Location 212)
Tags: pink
Harvard Business School Dean Kim B. Clark, it is “fast history.’’ In just a few years, market segments, companies, and technologies have emerged, matured, and declined. (Location 239)
Tags: blue
What all sustaining technologies have In common is that they improve the performance of established products, along the dimensions of performance that mainstream customers in major markets have historically valued. (Location 259)
Tags: pink
Disruptive technologies bring to a market a very different value proposition than had been available previously. Generally, disruptive technologies underperform established products in mainstream markets. But they have other features that a few fringe (and generally new) customers value. Products based on disruptive technologies are typically cheaper, simpler, smaller, and, frequently, more convenient to use. (Location 264)
Tags: pink
disruptive technologies that may underperform today, relative to what users in the market demand, may be fully performance-competitive in that same market tomorrow. (Location 275)
Tags: pink
disruptive products are simpler and cheaper; they generally promise lower margins, not greater profits. (Location 286)
Tags: pink
disruptive technologies typically are first commercialized in emerging or insignificant markets. (Location 287)
Tags: pink
leading firms’ most profitable customers generally don’t want, and indeed initially can’t use, products based on disruptive technologies. (Location 288)
Tags: pink
The highest-performing companies, in fact, are those that are the best at this, that is, they have well-developed systems for killing ideas that their customers don’t want. (Location 341)
Tags: pink
Creating an independent organization, with a cost structure honed to achieve profitability at the low margins characteristic of most disruptive technologies, is the only viable way for established firms to harness this principle. (Location 354)
Tags: pink
Not surprisingly, the Internet looms as an infrastructural technology that is enabling the disruption of many industries. (Location 486)
This is one of the innovator’s dilemmas: Blindly following the maxim that good managers should keep close to their customers can sometimes be a fatal mistake. (Location 520)
Their failure resulted from delay in making the strategic commitment to enter the emerging market in which the 8-inch drives initially could be sold. Interviews with marketing and engineering executives close to these companies suggest that the established 14-inch drive manufacturers were held captive by customers. (Location 726)
The organization’s structure and the way its groups learn to work together can then affect the way it can and cannot design new products. (Location 944)
The concept of the value network—the context within which a firm identifies and responds to customers’ needs, solves problems, procures input, reacts to competitors, and strives for profit—is central to this synthesis. 6 Within a value network, each firm’s competitive strategy, and particularly its past choices of markets, determines its perceptions of the economic value of a new technology. These perceptions, in turn, shape the rewards different firms expect to obtain through pursuit of sustaining and disruptive innovations. (Location 970)