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WORK ON STUFF THAT MATTERS
WHEN CLAYTON CHRISTENSEN INTRODUCED THE TERM DISRUPTIVE technology in his 1997 business classic, The Innovator’s Dilemma, he asked a very different question than “How can I get funded by convincing VCs that there’s a huge market I can blow up?” He wanted to know why existing companies fail to take advantage of new opportunities. He discovered that breakthrough technologies that are not yet mature first succeed by finding radically new markets, and only later disrupt existing markets.
When I first met Clay in person, at Matt Asay and Bryce Roberts’s Open Source Business Conference in 2004, he retold the story of how RCA had spent billions of dollars in current value trying without success to make the radio and television ...
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