The Innovator's Dilemma

Disruptive products tend to be simpler, cheaper, and more reliable and convenient than established products.

Good management was the most powerful reason they failed to stay atop their industries.

The very decision-making and resource-allocation processes that are key to the success of established companies are the very processes that reject disruptive technologies.

Disruptive technologies bring to a market a very different value proposition than had been available previously.

Companies whose investment processes demand quantification of market size and financial returns before they can enter a market get paralyzed when faced with disruptive technologies.

The attributes that make disruptive technologies unattractive to mainstream markets are the ones on which new markets will be built.

The needs of many computer users have increased more slowly than the rate of improvement provided by computer designers.

A disruptive innovation, by definition, must measure different attributes of performance than those relevant in established value networks.

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

The power and influence of leading customers is a major reason why companies’ product development trajectories overshoot the demands of mainstream markets.

The only useful information about the market will be what I create through expeditions into the market, through testing and probing, trial and error, by selling real products to real people who pay real money.

Think of your initial efforts at commercializing a disruptive technology as learning opportunities. Make revisions as you gather data.

The most formidable barrier the established firms faced is that they did not want to do this.

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.

The disruptive innovations were technologically straightforward. 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 popular slogan 'stay close to your customers' appears not always to be robust advice.

The degree of disruptiveness inherent in an innovation provides a fairly clear indication of when a mainstream organization might be capable of succeeding with it and when it might be expected to fail.

Heavyweight teams are tools to create new processes—new ways of working together that constitute new capabilities.

A separate organization is required when the mainstream organization’s values would render it incapable of focusing resources on the innovation project.

Blindly following the maxim that good managers should keep close to their customers can sometimes be a fatal mistake.