The reason why it is so difficult for existing firms to capitalize on disruptive innovations is that their processes and their business model that make them good at the existing business actually make them bad at competing for the disruption.
Almost always, great new ideas don't emerge from within a single person or function, but at the intersection of functions or people that have never met before.
Management is the opportunity to help people become better people. Practiced that way, it's a magnificent profession.
A disruptive innovation is a technologically simple innovation in the form of a product, service, or business model that takes root in a tier of the market that is unattractive to the established leaders in an industry.
Empowering innovations transform something that is complicated and expensive into something that is so much more simple and affordable that a much larger population can enjoy it.
The breakthrough innovations come when the tension is greatest and the resources are most limited. That's when people are actually a lot more open to rethinking the fundamental way they do business.
Life is an unending stream of extenuating circumstances.
Diabetes is a great example whereby, giving the patient the tools, you can manage yourself very well.
There is no single right answer or path forward, but there is one right way to frame the problem.
You may hate gravity, but gravity doesn't care.
The single most important factor in our long-term happiness is the relationships we have with our family and close friends.
Disruption is a process, not an event, and innovations can only be disruptive relative to something else.
Relative to the taxi industry, Uber is a sustaining innovation; that is, it makes customers' lives better. Uber targeted mainstream markets with a better service for existing customers, and it succeeded in serving them better than the incumbents.
The paradox explored in my book 'The Innovator's Dilemma' is that successful companies can fail by making the 'right' decisions in the wrong situations.
A great book seeks to explain causality, not correlation. It works to point out the circumstances in which it works, and where it doesn't. And in so doing, it is broadly applicable.
Most marketers think there's a concept called a product life cycle. Once you realize that the world is organized by jobs that need to be done, you understand that product life cycles don't exist.
I promise my students that if they take the time to figure out their life purpose, they'll look back on it as the most important thing they discovered while at school. If they don't figure it out, they will just sail off without a rudder and get buffeted in the very rough seas of life.
When you improve your product so it does the customer's job better, then you gain market share.
For 300 years, higher education was not disruptable because there was no technological core.
Finding a 'sacrificial lamb' on whom to tag blame for complicated problems is an important instrument in the toolkit of politicians, because it deflects blame for the nation's economic woes away from their own regulatory lapses, economic mismanagement and coddling to labor unions.
