The Innovator's Dilemna

Clayton Christensen's Innovation Brain. Keen On… Clay Christensen: How To Escape The Innovator’s Dilemma [TCTV] Why do so many great companies fail?

Professor Clay Christensen of the Harvard Business School argued they fail because of something he called The Innovator’s Dilemma – a term he popularized to describe the way in which smart companies become prisoners of their own innovation. So is it possible to escape the innovator’s dilemma? I had the honor of interviewing Clay at The Economist‘s Innovation event in Berkeley last week where the great man talked to me about how Google might escape the innovator’s dilemma, why he worries about Apple’s future, how to effectively innovate in education and healthcare and why most business school professors get the economy so wrong.

This is the second in a week long series of interviews from the Innovation event. Steve Jobs Solved the Innovator's Dilemma - James Allworth. By James Allworth | 11:38 AM October 24, 2011 In the lead up to today’s release of the Steve Jobs biography, there’s been an increasing stream of news surrounding its subject.

As a business researcher, I was particularly interested in this recent article that referenced from his biography a list of Jobs’s favorite books. There’s one business book on this list, and it “deeply influenced” Jobs. That book is The Innovator’s Dilemma by HBS Professor Clay Christensen. But what’s most interesting to me isn’t that The Innovator’s Dilemma was on that list.