Quotes About Innovation

if new technologies enable new market applications to emerge, the introduction of new technology may not be inherently cannibalistic.

They generally packaged known technologies in a unique architecture and enabled the use of these products in applications where magnetic data storage and retrieval previously had not been technologically or economically feasible.

the firms that led the industry in every instance of developing and adopting disruptive technologies were entrants to the industry, not its incumbent leaders.

Because an organization's structure and how its groups work together may have been established to facilitate the design of its dominant product, the direction of causality may ultimately reverse itself: 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.

while keeping close to our customers is an important management paradigm for handling sustaining innovations, it may provide misleading data for handling disruptive ones.

the more successful approach has been to find a new market that values the current characteristics of the disruptive technology. Disruptive technology should be framed as a marketing challenge, not a technological one.

Managers who confront disruptive technological change must be leaders, not followers, in commercializing disruptive technologies.

To succeed predictably, disruptors must be good theorists. As they shape their growth business to be disruptive, they must align every critical process and decision to fit the disruptive circumstance.

that leadership is more crucial in coping with disruptive technologies than with sustaining ones, and that small, emerging markets cannot solve the near-term growth and profit requirements of large companies.

Managers who don't bet the farm on their first idea, who leave room to try, fail, learn quickly, and try again, can succeed at developing the understanding of customers, markets, and technology needed to commercialize disruptive innovations.

People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole. It's a profound insight—first popularized by legendary Harvard marketing professor Ted Levitt decades ago.1

Why do well-managed companies fail? He concludes that they often fail because the very management practices that have allowed them to become industry leaders also make it extremely difficult for them to develop the disruptive technologies that ultimately steal away their markets.

But in disruptive situations, action must be taken before careful plans are made. Because much less can be known about what markets need or how large they can become, plans must serve a very different purpose: They must be plans for learning rather than plans for implementation.

There is no evidence that any of the leaders in developing and adopting sustaining technologies developed a discernible competitive advantage over the followers

they reached as far upmarket as they could in each new product generation, until their drives packed the capacity to appeal to the value networks above them. It is this upward mobility that makes disruptive technologies so dangerous to established firms—and so attractive to entrants.

Companies make attractive money when they solve the hardest problems.

People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole. It's

It is in disruptive innovations, where we know least about the market, that there are such strong first-mover advantages. This is the innovator's dilemma.

Tell them that if they're not occasionally failing, then they're not aiming high enough.

This is because, in fact, the best resource allocation systems are designed precisely to weed out ideas that are unlikely to find large, profitable, receptive markets.

You need to define an opportunity that is disruptive relative to all the established players in the targeted market, or you should not invest in the idea.

In dealing with disruptive technologies leading to new markets, however, market researchers and business planners have consistently dismal records.

If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing." After decades of watching great companies fail over and over again, I've come to the conclusion that there is, indeed, a better question to ask: What job did you hire that product to do?

In sustaining circumstances—when the race entails making better products that can be sold for more money to attractive customers—we found that incumbents almost always prevail. In disruptive circumstances—when the challenge is to commercialize a simpler, more convenient product that sells for less money and appeals to a new or unattractive customer set—the entrants are likely to beat the incumbents.