Moonshots and Flying Kites: How Companies Remain Innovative in Our Accelerating Tech Environment
More than two decades ago, Clay Christensen published his seminal work “The Innovator’s Dilemma.” The widely acclaimed book proposed that successful, incumbent companies (across both time and industry categories) are susceptible to “disruptive innovation.”
But the book was written in the era before the iPhone, before Google, before two decades of ever-accelerating technology innovation. How has this thesis held up? How have modern tech companies wrestled with these principles and attempted to stave off this cycle? We will examine the core tenets of Christensen’s thesis through the lens of the last 20 years, and discuss what it means for innovation moving forward.