Give Responsibility for Disruptive Technologies to Organizations Whose Customers Need Them

By: Clayton M. Christensen

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Synopsis: Although most executives believe they make the crucial decisions in their organizations, in fact it is a company's customers who effectively control what it can and cannot do. Through a survival-of-the-fittest mechanism, those firms that rise to prominence in their industries generally will be those whose people and processes are most keenly tuned to giving their customers what they want. This chapter emphasizes that if new technologies are not yet accepted by a company's customer base, it may often be advisable to create an independent, embedded organization focused on the disruptive opportunity before moving the whole company in the new direction. This chapter was originally published as chapter 5 of "The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail."