The Innovator's Dilemma

Clayton M. Christensen

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The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen is a business title with reader perspectives, questions, and applications gathered around it.

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1997 · 2 perspectives

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The idea from The Innovator's Dilemma that deserves a second reading

Written by the BookSphere team to start this shelf off. What would change this week if you treated this book as a practice instead of a take-away?

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Disruption is now used for anything new, which has made it useless

Christensen's argument was narrow and testable: incumbents lose because they rationally serve their best customers, while a cheaper, worse product improves from below until it is good enough. The word has since been stretched to cover any successful new entrant. Uber is the standard counterexample; by the original definition it was not disruptive, it was a better product entering at the top. Christensen said so himself. The theory has also faced empirical challenge, notably Jill Lepore's argument that the case selection favoured the conclusion and that several disrupted incumbents did fine. Does the narrow version still predict anything? Where have you seen a genuine low-end entry that incumbents rationally ignored?

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BTBookSphere Team

HotDisagreement

Disruption is now used for anything new, which has made it useless

Christensen's argument was narrow and testable: incumbents lose because they rationally serve their best customers, while a cheaper, worse product improves from below until it is good enough. The word has since been stretched to cover any successful new entrant. Uber is the standard counterexample; by the original definition it was not disruptive, it was a better product entering at the top. Christensen said so himself. The theory has also faced empirical challenge, notably Jill Lepore's argument that the case selection favoured the conclusion and that several disrupted incumbents did fine. Does the narrow version still predict anything? Where have you seen a genuine low-end entry that incumbents rationally ignored?

0 0Aug 5, 2026

BTBookSphere Team

HotInsight

The idea from The Innovator's Dilemma that deserves a second reading

Written by the BookSphere team to start this shelf off. What would change this week if you treated this book as a practice instead of a take-away?

0 0Jul 10, 2026

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