Thinking books · Strategy & competition · Clayton Christensen, 1997

The Innovator’s Dilemma — the big ideas

Why well-run companies fail, precisely by doing the things that made them successful.

Free — no account needed to read

The big ideas

Listening to your best customers and investing in your highest-margin business are both correct decisions that systematically cause incumbents to miss the technology that replaces them.

Disruptive products start worse on the dimensions incumbents care about, and better on a dimension they dismiss, which is why dismissal is rational right up until it is fatal.

The failure is organisational rather than perceptual: the companies usually saw it coming and could not allocate resources against their own profitable business.

The term has since been stretched to mean any new competitor. The specific mechanism is the useful part.

Practise it — no need to have read it

Name something in your field currently dismissed as not good enough. Write what dimension it is better on, and who that serves.

A hint: Dismissal is usually right about the quality and wrong about the trajectory.

Where it shows up in real life

• Competitive strategy
• Product decisions
• Career bets on a technology

Described in our own words with the source named — never quoted, and not a substitute for reading the book.