INNOVATION
Remembering Clayton
Christensen, The Father
Of Disruptive Innovation
By Senorine Wasike
“
When I have an interview with my
God at the end of my life, He is not
going to ask me to show him how high
I went in anybody’s organizational chart or
how much money I left behind in a bank
account…” He is going to say, “Clay, I put
you in that circumstance. Now can we talk
about the individual people whose lives
you have helped become better people…?” Business Quotes
These are extracts from a TEDx video by
Clayton Christensen, based on one of his
books, ‘How will you measure your life?’
On 23rd January 2020, seven years after
the video was published, Clayton passed
on. This quote reminds me of the interview I
watched of former Safaricom CEO Bob
Collymore after the launch of Pesalink
an interbank money transfer solution by
Kenyan banks. When asked if the new
service would disrupt the Mpesa bank
to mobile transfer service by Safaricom,
Collymore confirmed that Mpesa’s core
target remains the common mwananchi
(bottom of the pyramid) who transacts
under Ksh. 70,000. Pesalink had increased
interbank transactions to Ksh. 1 million,
which still ignored the low end of the
market.
I have never met Clayton, but his
scholarly work has impacted my journey
as an innovator and Christian. As an
aspiring scholar in the area of strategy and
innovation, Clayton’s books and articles
have played a key role in building a firm
foundation for my doctorate. There is
rarely an assignment or discussion I have
had without referencing Clayton.
In honor of this innovation giant, I have
compiled some of my favorite quotes from
his many books and articles. May these
quotes inspire you to be better at life.
“I brought one big question with me to
Harvard. Why do smart companies fail?
Smart companies fail because they do
everything right. They cater to high-
profit-margin customers and ignore the
low end of the market, where disruptive
innovations emerge from.”
“Innovation almost always is not successful
the first time out. You try something and
it doesn't work and it takes confidence to
say we haven't failed yet. Ultimately you
become commercially successful."
Competitiveness is far more about doing
what customers value than doing what you
think you're good at. How many times do
we justify new business opportunities based
on existing business lenses? As a result, we
force-fit new products or services to consum-
ers who do not care. The result is failure.
72 MAL34/20 ISSUE
The hardest thing for most firms is to
accept failure and stop flogging a dead
horse. Research shows that upto 90% of
all innovation fail in their first year. Firms
that have succeeded in innovation have
adopted a post-launch iterative learning
process to course-correct and make better
the initial product or service concept.
“Watching how customers actually use
a product provides much more reliable
information than can be gleaned from a
verbal interview or a focus group.”
Most business leaders agree that a great
product or service is anchored on a
consumer insight yet a lot of the questions
asked by the same businesses may have
lots of unconscious bias that affects the
outcome. Ethnography is increasingly
being adopted as a research method
because it overcomes this challenge.
“A disruptive innovation is a technologically
simple innovation in the form of a product,
service, or business model that takes root
in a tier of the market that is unattractive
to the established leaders in an industry.”
This quote reminds me of Uber and
Airbnb, companies that targeted markets
that were perceived to be unattractive and
successfully outcompeted the established
pioneers.
“Almost always, great new ideas don't
emerge from within a single person
or function, but at the intersection of
functions or people that have never met
before.”
Embedding
a
culture
of
innovation