The Innovator’s Dilemma

By Clayton M. Christensen

Review by Alexandra Carvalho

Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma is one of the few business books that genuinely reshapes how you see organisational success. It dismantles the comforting myth that companies fail because they become complacent or incompetent. Christensen’s argument is far more unsettling: great companies fail because they do exactly what good management teaches them to do.

Through surgical case studies in disk drives, excavators, steel, and computing, Christensen reveals a structural trap. Companies optimise for the customers they already have, the margins they must maintain, and the markets that validate their existing capabilities. They build processes, cultures, and values around sustaining innovation. Then disruption appears, always from the edges, carried by products that are cheaper, smaller, simpler, and initially inferior. And the incumbents cannot move. Not because they cannot see the threat, but because they are organised to reject it.

Christensen’s core contribution is clarity. He separates sustaining technologies from disruptive ones, showing that failure is not a technology problem but a resource-allocation problem. Organisations become prisoners of their best customers and strongest capabilities. They overshoot market demand, climb up-market, and leave a vacuum beneath them. Disruption enters through that vacuum every single time.

Christensen does not write for theorists. He writes for executives who think they are safe.

Key Insight

“Good management is the problem.”

The very systems that make a company excellent at delivering value today prevent it from being excellent at delivering value tomorrow. Disruptive innovation is not a technological event. It is a structural mismatch between how organisations make decisions and where future markets will emerge.

Why It Matters

The Innovator’s Dilemma is essential for anyone building or governing technology in a period defined by AI, automation, and agentic systems. The playbook of “listen to your best customers” and “optimise for margin” collapses under technological discontinuity. We see this today in enterprise AI adoption: the largest organisations are the slowest to embrace agentic workflows, internal automation, and multi-agent operating models, not because they lack talent, but because their structures reject low-margin experiments.

Christensen forces the reader to confront uncomfortable truths. Markets that matter tomorrow cannot be analysed today. Processes that deliver reliability in large businesses cannot produce agility in emerging ones. Structures built for efficiency suffocate exploration.

The answer is organisational design, not inspiration. This is why Steve Bartlett’s “FlightX” team mirrors Christensen’s Wild Ducks and IBM’s early skunkworks. To survive disruption, you must create a team that is free from the gravitational pull of the existing business. A team that is allowed, indeed instructed, to kill the core.

Read This If You Are:

• A founder or executive who believes your existing customers will tell you what to build next.
• A policymaker analysing why incumbents struggle to adopt new technologies even when they understand the risks.
• A technology leader responsible for navigating AI-driven change and building internal structures resilient to disruption.
• Anyone who still believes failure is caused by poor leadership rather than structural incentives.

What You’ll Walk Away With

• A precise mental model of disruptive versus sustaining innovation and why the difference matters.
• A deeper understanding of why incumbents almost never win the next era, even when they see it coming.
• A practical blueprint for building autonomous teams that can explore low-margin, low-certainty markets without being smothered by the core business.
• A sober recognition that disruption is predictable in pattern, but rarely predictable in timing.

Christensen’s work remains foundational because he does not moralise failure. He explains it. And once you see the structure, you cannot unsee it. It is a book that reorganises how you think about innovation, leadership, and competitive advantage.

📚 Buy the Book
View on Amazon