Clayton Christensen often attends events related to the newest management research developments. Many sessions of the entrepreneurship division and the technology and innovation management division are focused on high-tech entrepreneurship & business development. So let’s take a look at a few remarkable Clayton Christensen quotes.
Using value creation modeling to estimate the possibilities of creating a business in the future with certain products, is the way to go. Jim Anderson, professor of marketing, Kellogs business school, Chicago trains our entrepreneurs to make better assessments of their financial value. See also this TEDxBoston video with Professor Clay Christensen:
His work also fits the norms of Clayton Christensen being well based on strong theories and developed into practical modeling of value creation and gender-related developments in market networks. But now, let’s take a look at some quotes from Clayton Christensen he shared when he was awarded the innovation award of the technology & innovation division for his career.
Professor Christensen accepted this award with an inspiring and moving speech about his lessons learned in his research and consultancy on disruptive innovation. We know that often, success comes after failure. It’s just something we must learn to deal with.
He had several messages for universities on how to teach management students, and for managers. Well, businesses can do well by doing good and one common thread in his thought is that managers need good practice models, based on good theory, as one cannot base decisions on data from the past alone.
Especially in innovation, the future is expected to be different than the past, therefore the predictive power of analysis of data from the past is limited. Models of innovation development, however, are informative to guide entrepreneurial managers with the right entrepreneurial DNA in their quest for realizing an innovation process.
“It’s much easier to stick to your principles one hundred percent of the time than to stick to them ninety-eight percent of the time. When you’ll give in to “only this once”, based on just a marginal analysis of cost, as a few of my earlier classmates did, you’ll be regretting that where you’ll be ending up.
You need to define for just yourself what you’re standing for and draw your line in a secure place.” Let’s face it, startups can create significant change for sustainable business and that’s what they should use their talents for.
As an example, consider how difficult it was for IBM to understand the possibilities of the PC when they developed it in the late seventies/early eighties. Looking into the past was not useful, as there were very few practices to analyze.
The imagination of entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates determined the development of new innovative applications of existing IT such a windows based computers or Apple Ipad, but add to this imagination obviously the business potential of opportunities conceived by the entrepreneurs need to be assessed.