Clayton M. Christensen - The Innovator's Dilemma (1997)

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The concept of the value network — the context within which a firm identifies and responds to customers' needs, solves problems, procures input, reacts to competitors, and strives for profit — is central to this synthesis.

Clayton M. Christensen
This is one of the innovator's dilemmas: Blindly following the maxim that good managers should keep close to their customers can sometimes be a fatal mistake.

Clayton M. Christensen
Generally, disruptive innovations were technologically straightforward, consisting of off-the-shelf components put together in a product architecture that was often simpler than prior approaches. They offered less of what customers in established markets wanted and so could rarely be initially employed there. They offered a different package of attributes valued only in emerging markets remote from, and unimportant to, the mainstream

Clayton M. Christensen
It's easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time.

Clayton M. Christensen
Watching how customers actually use a product provides much more reliable information than can be gleaned from a verbal interview or a focus group.

Clayton M. Christensen
It is a company's customers who effectively control what it can and cannot do.

Clayton M. Christensen
Government mandates, incidentally, are likely to distort rather than solve the problem of finding a market. I would, therefore, force my organization to live by its wits rather than to rely on capricious subsidies or non-economic-based regulation to fuel my business.

Clayton M. Christensen
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.

Clayton M. Christensen
Because these firms listened to their customers, invested aggressively in new technologies that would provide their customers more and better products of the sort they wanted, and because they carefully studied market trends and systematically allocated investment capital to innovations that promised the best returns, they lost their positions of leadership.

Clayton M. Christensen