In Thinkers 50 Innovation: Breakthrough Thinking to Take Your Business to the Next Level , Stuart Crainer and Des Dearlove include an interview of Clay Christensen.

Here is one of the Q&As:

What exactly is disruptive innovation?

Disruptive innovation has a very specific meaning. It is not a breakthrough innovation that makes good products a lot better. It has a very specific definition, and that is that it transforms a product that historically was so expensive and complicated that only a few people with a lot of money and a lot of skill had access to it. A disruptive innovation makes the product so much more affordable and acceptable that a much larger population has access to it.

And so it creates new markets. But the technology leaders who made the complicated, expensive stuff find it very hard to move in the direction of the affordable and simple because that is so incompatible with their business model. And so it’s almost a paradox within itself. But what it says is, if you are a little boy and want to kill a giant, the way you do it is by going after this kind of product, where the leader is actually motivated to walk away from you rather than engage you.

To learn more about Christensen, please click here.

To learn more about Thinkers50, please click here.

Thinkers50 on Innovationwas published by McGraw-Hill Education.