Clayton Christensen
Disruptive innovation researcher
An AI built from 16 public sources about Clayton Christensen's work. It is not Clayton Christensen and is not endorsed by them.
Think through a growth or innovation problem the way Clayton Christensen did: ask which theory explains it, watch the low end and the non-customers, find the job the customer is trying to get done, and protect new ideas from the old business model.
Big ideas
- Good management can be the cause of failure: The dilemma in his title is that leading firms fail by doing what good managers are taught to do.
- Sustaining and disruptive innovation: Sustaining innovations make existing products better for current customers.
- Capable people get trapped by processes and models: Big firms struggle with disruptive change because they put capable people inside processes and business models that set them up to fail .
- Jobs to be done: The core claim: customers do not buy products, they pull them into their lives to make progress.
- Where jobs hide, and how to hear them: He offered five places to look, and said there was no single right method .
- Experience, the resume and the purpose brand: A job spec turns the job into a blueprint: the three sides, the trade-offs, the full set of rivals to beat and the obstacles and anxieties to clear .
Hire Clayton Christensen for
- Customer research: Find the job behind a purchase, and rewrite a survey so it asks about situations and struggles instead of ages and incomes.
- Switching: Learn why the people who bought finally moved, and what holds the rest back.
- Rivals: A cheap, simple competitor has shown up. Is it a nuisance or the start of something that could replace you? And who are you really competing with for the job?
- Product and features: Use the customer's job to decide what to keep, cut and name, and what happens around the product.
- New markets: Find the people who buy nothing in your category and what a simple version would need to do for them.
- Organisation: Decide whether a new idea needs its own small team, and who should own the customer's job.
- Measures: Check whether your numbers show customers getting their job done.
- Reasoning: Test a plan by asking which theory sits behind it before you copy a success story.
Skills from their work
- Customer alternatives researcher
- Customer buying reasons finder
- Customer fit review
- Customer job interview planner
- Customer needs profile builder
- Customer purchase interview guide
- Customer success metric planner
- Customer switching barrier planner
- Customer switching journey map
- Disruption risk checker
- Job experience mapper
- Job name picker
- Job spec writer
- New customer experience review
- Product range focus review
- Purchase history interview guide
- Unmet customer need finder
- Unmet customer need researcher
- Buyer brief writer
Pairs well with
Built from
- Clayton Christensen, Wikipedia
- Clayton M. Christensen, 1952 to 2020 (obituary), Harvard Business School
- Clayton Christensen, guru of disruptive innovation and Latter-day Saint leader, dies at 67, Tad Walch, Deseret News (2020)
- Disruptive innovation, Wikipedia
- The Innovator's Dilemma, Wikipedia
- Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave (opening section), Joseph L. Bower and Clayton M. Christensen, Harvard Business Review (1995)
- Meeting the Challenge of Disruptive Change (opening section), Clayton M. Christensen and Michael Overdorf, Harvard Business Review (2000)
- Marketing Malpractice: The Cause and the Cure (opening section), Clayton M. Christensen, Scott Cook and Taddy Hall, Harvard Business Review (2005)
- How Will You Measure Your Life? (opening section), Clayton M. Christensen, Harvard Business Review (2010)
- What Is Disruptive Innovation? (opening section), Clayton M. Christensen, Michael E. Raynor and Rory McDonald, Harvard Business Review (2015)
- Know Your Customers' Jobs to Be Done (opening section), Clayton M. Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon and David S. Duncan, Harvard Business Review (2016)
- Clay Christensen's Milkshake Marketing, Carmen Nobel, HBS Working Knowledge (2011)
- The Disruptor, Peter B. Gardner, BYU Magazine (2013)
- Estimating the innovator's dilemma: Q&A with Yale economist Mitsuru Igami, Yale News (2017)
- Outcome-Driven Innovation, Wikipedia
- Competing Against Luck, Clayton M. Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon and David S. Duncan (2016)