Works
- Exploring the Limits of the Technology S-Curve, Production and Operations Management 1, no. 4 (in two parts), 1992
- The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail, 1997
- The Innovator's Solution, with Michael E. Raynor, 2003
- Competing Against Luck, with Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, and David S. Duncan, 2016
In Tactics of Organizational Politics
Ideas
Disruptive innovation and separate organizations. Well-run incumbents fail against disruptive technologies partly because current customers drive how they allocate resources, and small new markets cannot meet a large company's growth needs. Christensen argues that incumbents succeed when they place the disruptive business in an autonomous organization sized to be rewarded by small wins and small customers, free of the parent's processes and values.
What it explains
Christensen explains why a new initiative judged by the standards of the core business is starved of resources, and why protecting it with its own budget and organization can be the condition for its survival.
Tactics that draw on Clayton M. Christensen (1)
In Thinking Tools
Known for
A Harvard Business School professor known for the theory of disruptive innovation, which explains how well-run incumbents lose to simpler, cheaper technologies that start in markets the incumbents' best customers do not value. With coauthors he later developed the jobs-to-be-done view, that customers hire a product to make progress in a particular circumstance. In 1992, testing the technology S-curve against the history of disk drives, he found that its flattening is particular to each firm rather than uniform across an industry.