The Innovator's Dilemma

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"It is about well-managed companies that have their competitive antenna up, listen astutely to their customers, invest aggressively in new technologies, and yet still lose market dominance."

"Generally, disruptive technologies underperform established products in mainstream markets. But they have other features that a few fringe (and generally new) customers value."

"A few stunningly simple and consistent factors that have repeatedly determined the success and failure of the industry's best firms."

"The problem established firms seem unable to confront successfully is that of downward vision and mobility, in terms of the trajectory map."

"Within a value network, each firm's competitive strategy, and particularly its past choices of markets, determines its perceptions of the economic value of a new technology."

"In its mature stages, the technology will asymptotically approach a natural or physical limit such that ever greater periods of time or inputs of engineering effort will be required to achieve improvements."

"Addressing the needs of the firms' most powerful customers almost always preempted resources from disruptive technologies with small markets and poorly defined customer needs."

"The popular slogan, stay close to your customers appears not always to be robust advice."

"Value networks strongly define and delimit what companies within them can and cannot do."

"Rational managers can rarely build a cogent case for entering small, poorly defined low-end markets that offer only lower profitability."

"Projects that fail because the technologists couldn't deliver often are not regarded as failures at all, because a lot is learned from the effort."

"There were four fundamental principles of organizational nature that managers in successful firms consistently recognized and harnessed."

"The team should be structured to facilitate the cross-functional interaction that is characteristic of different types of projects."

"Markets that do not exist cannot be analyzed: Suppliers and customers must discover them together."

"Failure is intrinsic to the search for initial market applications for disruptive technologies."

"As it creates the threat or opportunity for a disruptive technology, performance oversupply also triggers a fundamental change in the basis of competition in the product's market."

"A product becomes a commodity within a specific market segment when the repeated changes in the basis of competition completely play themselves out."

"The firms that were most successful in commercializing a disruptive technology were those framing their primary development challenge as a marketing one."