Clayton Christensen

Clayton M. Christensen is the Robert and Jane Cizik Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, and is widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost experts on innovation and growth.

Professor Christensen holds a B.A. with highest honors in economics from Brigham Young University, and an M.Phil. in applied econometrics from Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. He received an MBA with High Distinction from the Harvard Business School in 1979, graduating as a George F. Baker Scholar. He was awarded his DBA from the Harvard Business School in 1992.

Christensen has served as a director on the boards of a number of public and private companies. He is currently a board member at Tata Consulting Services, Franklin Covey, W.R. Hambrecht, and Vanu Inc. Christensen also serves on Singapore's Research, Innovation and Enterprise Council (RIEC), and has advised the executives of many of the world’s major corporations.  They generate tens of billions of dollars in revenues every year from product and service innovations that were inspired by his research.

Christensen is an experienced entrepreneur, having started three successful companies.  Prior to joining the HBS faculty, Professor Christensen served as chairman and president of CPS Technologies a firm he co-founded with several MIT professors in 1984. CPS is a leading developer of products and manufacturing processes using high-technology metals and ceramics such as silicon nitride, silicon carbide, and aluminum oxide. Christensen has also founded Innosight, a consulting firm that uses his theories of innovation to help companies create new growth businesses.

Professor Christensen became a faculty member at the Harvard Business School in 1992, and was awarded a full professorship with tenure in 1998, becoming the first professor in the school’s modern history to achieve tenure at such an accelerated pace.

Professor Christensen is the bestselling author of five books, including his seminal work, The Innovator's Dilemma, which received the Global Business Book Award for the best business book of the year, The Innovator’s Solution, and Seeing What’s Next. Recently, Christensen has focused the lens of disruptive innovation on social issues such as education and health care.  Disrupting Class looks at the root causes of why schools struggle and offers solutions, while The Innovator's Prescription examines how to fix our healthcare system. Four of his five books have received awards as the best books in their categories in the years of their publication.

Professor Christensen's writings have been featured in a variety of publications, and have won a number of awards, such as the Best Dissertation Award from The Institute of Management Sciences for his doctoral thesis on technology development in the disk drive industry; the Production and Operations Management Society's William Abernathy Award, presented to the author of the best paper in the management of technology; the Newcomen Society’s award for the best paper in business history; and the 1995, 2001, 2008 and 2009 McKinsey Awards for articles published in the Harvard Business Review.

• TOPIC DESCRIPTION

  Professor Christensen's presentations can be customized according to your needs. He is often asked to speak on themes related to his most successful books – The Innovator's Dilemma, and The Innovator's Solution. He can also speak about his two new books: one on solutions to the health care crisis of our era called The Innovator's Prescriptions: A Disruptive Solution to Health Care and the other, a similarly daunting goal, on an innovative solution to the state of our educational systems called Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change The Way the World Learns.
  
  The essential principle in Professor Christensen's disruptive innovation theory (DI) is that companies innovate faster than people's lives change.

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  January 2009

  The Innovator's Prescription

  Harvard Business School’s Clayton M. Christensen—whose bestselling The Innovator’s Dilemma revolutionized the business world—presents The Innovator’s Prescription, a comprehensive analysis of the strategies that will improve health care and make it affordable. Christensen applies the principles of disruptive innovation to the broken health care system with two pioneers in the field—Dr. Jerome Grossman and Dr. Jason Hwang. Together, they examine a range of symptoms and offer proven solutions.

  
  
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  May 2008

  Disrupting Class

  According to recent studies in neuroscience, the way we learn doesn't always match up with the way we are taught. If we hope to stay competitive-academically, economically, and technologically-we need to rethink our understanding of intelligence, reevaluate our educational system, and reinvigorate our commitment to learning. In other words, we need “disruptive innovation.” Now, in his long-awaited new book, Clayton M. Christensen takes one of the most important issues of our time-education-and apply Christensen's now-famous theories of “disruptive” change using a wide range of real-life examples. Whether you're a school administrator, government official, business leader, parent, teacher, or entrepreneur, you'll discover surprising new ideas, outside-the-box strategies, and straight-A success stories.

  
  
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  January 2007

  The Innovator's Solution

  At best one company in ten is able to sustain profitable growth. Yet capital markets demand that all companies seek it relentlessly and mercilessly punish those who fail. Why is consistent, persistent growth so difficult to achieve? Surprisingly, it’s not for lack of great ideas or capable managers, nor is it because customers are too fickle or innovation too unpredictable. Innovation fails, say Clayton M. Christensen and Michael E. Raynor, because organizations unwittingly strip the disruptive potential from new ideas before they ever see the light of day. Drawing on years of in-depth research and illustrated by company examples across many industries, Christensen and Raynor argue that innovation can be a predictable process that delivers sustainable, profitable growth. They identify the forces that cause managers to make bad decisions as they package and shape new ideas—and offer new frameworks to help managers create the right conditions, at the right time, for a disruption to succeed.

  
  
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  September 2004

  Seeing What's Next

  Now, internationally renowned innovation expert Clayton M. Christensen presents a groundbreaking framework for predicting outcomes in the evolution of any industry. Based on proven theories outlined in Christensen's landmark books The Innovator's Dilemma and The Innovator's Solution, Seeing What's Next  offers a practical, three-part model that helps decision-makers spot the signals of industry change, determine the outcome of competitive battles, and assess whether a firm's actions will ensure or threaten future success. Through in-depth case studies of industries from aviation to health care, the authors illustrate the predictive power of innovation theory in action.

  
  
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  January 2003

  The Innovator's Dilemma

  In this revolutionary bestseller Clayton M. Christensen says outstanding companies can do everything right and still lose their market leadership, or worse, disappear completely. And he not only proves what he says, he tells others how to avoid a similar fate. Focusing on "disruptive technology" of the Honda Supercub, Intel's 8088 processor, and the hydraulic excavator, Christensen shows why most companies miss "the next great wave." Whether in electronics or retailing, a successful company with established products will get pushed aside unless managers know when to abandon traditional business practices. Using the lessons of successes and failures from leading companies, The Innovator's Dilemma presents a set of rules for capitalizing on the phenomenon of disruptive innovation.