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New research on disruptive innovation from Harvard Business School faculty on issues including disruptive innovations that will make health care both more affordable and more effective, and how enterprising digital startups are wreaking havoc on established firms.
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How Following Best Business Practices Can Improve Health Care

by Sean Silverthorne

Why do Harvard Business School scholars spend so much time and money analyzing health care delivery? Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

Reinventing Retail: The Novel Resurgence of Independent Bookstores

by Ryan Raffaelli

Independent booksellers in the United States have proven resilient in the face of multiple technological and business model shifts in the bookselling industry. By tapping into a larger social movement that promotes the value of shopping local and a desire to cultivate community, successful booksellers are differentiating themselves from online and big box competitors.

Advanced Leadership Requires More Than Outside-The-Box Thinking

by Sean Silverthorne

In a new book, Rosabeth Moss Kanter encourages leaders to "think outside the building" to overcome establishment paralysis and generate powerful innovation. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

The Manager's Guide to Leveraging Disruption

by Sean Silverthorne

Clayton M. Christensen's seminal book, The Innovator's Dilemma, helped ignite the idea of innovative disruption. His Harvard Business School colleagues have been adding to innovation research ever since. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

If the Key to Business Success Is Focus, Why Does Amazon Work?

Sunil Gupta explores the infiltration of Amazon into dozens of industries including web services, grocery, and movie production. What’s the big plan? Is the company spread too thin? Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

Would You Live in a Smart City Where Government Controls Privacy?

Toronto is experimenting with smart-city concepts envisioned by Google spinoff Sidewalk Labs. Leslie John and Mitch Weiss discuss the tradeoffs of using technology to improve modern city life. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

Rocket-tunity: Can Private Firms Turn a Profit in Space?

by Scott Wallask

Private rocket companies are competing to be the first to send paying tourists into space, perhaps even this year. Matthew Weinzierl lays out the strategic roadmap to the stars. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

What’s Really Disrupting Business? It’s Not Technology

by Danielle Kost

Technology doesn't drive disruption—customers do. In a new book, marketing professor Thales Teixeira argues that successful disruptors are faster to spot and serve emerging customer needs than larger competitors. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

Everyone Knows Innovation is Essential to Business Success—Except Board Directors

by Michael Blanding

In a recent survey of 5,000 board members, innovation was not ranked high on their list of priorities. What are they not seeing? ask Boris Groysberg and Yo-Jud Cheng. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

Using Fintech to Disrupt Eastern Bank from Within

When Eastern Bank decided to battle a threat from new competitors, it hired a fintech executive to set up Eastern Labs and start innovating. Karen Mills discusses her case study on what happened next. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

On Target: Rethinking the Retail Website

by Dina Gerdeman

Target is one big-brand retailer that seems to have survived and even thrived in the apocalyptic retail landscape. What's its secret? Srikant Datar discusses the company's relentless focus on online data. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

Can Amazon Do What Walmart Couldn’t, Stop the 'Wheel of Retailing'?

by James Heskett

SUMMING UP Is Amazon's growing retail power capable of breaking the "wheel of retailing" theory? James Heskett's readers weigh in. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

Clayton Christensen: The Theory of Jobs To Be Done

by Dina Gerdeman

Clayton M. Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma was a classic text on how companies fail. In a new book, Competing Against Luck, Christensen tackles the opposite challenge: how companies succeed. First lesson, discover what job consumers are hiring your product to do. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

Is Company Failure Inevitable?

by Dina Gerdeman

Companies don’t generally fail because of competition; it’s out-of-touch leadership that kills them. Lead and Disrupt coauthor Michael L. Tushman discusses how companies must continue to invest in their core products while innovating in new areas. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

Disruptors Sell What Customers Want and Let Competitors Sell What They Don’t

by Michael Blanding

By "decoupling" activities that consumers value from the ones they don't, enterprising digital startups are wreaking havoc on established firms. Thales Teixeira discusses his research on the second wave of Internet disruption. Open for comment; 8 Comment(s) posted.

Clayton Christensen’s “How Will You Measure Your Life?”

World-renowned innovation expert Clayton M. Christensen explores the personal benefits of business research in the forthcoming book How Will You Measure Your Life? Coauthored with James Allworth and Karen Dillon, the book explains how well-tested academic theories can help us find meaning and happiness not just at work, but in life. Open for comment; 75 Comment(s) posted.

Clayton Christensen on Disrupting Health Care

by Deborah Blagg

In The Innovator's Prescription, Clayton Christensen and his coauthors target disruptive innovations that will make health care both more affordable and more effective. From the HBS Alumni Bulletin. Closed for comment; 0 Comment(s) posted.

How to Revive Health-Care Innovation

by Clayton M. Christensen, Jerome H. Grossman, M.D. M.D. & Jason Hwang

Simple solutions to complex problems lead to breakthroughs in industries from retailing to personal computers to printing. So let's try health care, too. According to HBS professor Clayton M. Christensen and coauthors of The Innovator's Prescription, such disruption to an industry might look like a threat, but it "always proves to be an extraordinary growth opportunity." Book excerpt. Key concepts include: Most disruptions have three enablers: a simplifying technology, a business model innovation, and a disruptive value network. Business model innovations are almost always forged by new entrants to an industry. Disruption of an industry rarely happens piecemeal. It is more common that entirely new value networks arise, displacing the old. Always, the technological enablers of disruption are successfully deployed against an industry's simplest problems first. Health care is no different. Closed for comment; 0 Comment(s) posted.

How Disruptive Innovation Changes Education

by Martha Lagace

HBS professor Clayton M. Christensen, who developed the theory of disruptive innovation, joins colleagues Michael B. Horn and Curtis W. Johnson to advocate for ways in which ideas around innovation can spur much-needed improvements in public education. A Q&A with the authors of Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns. Key concepts include: As an industry, education has certain elements that have made the market difficult to penetrate and lasting reform hard to come by. As a general rule, the most promising areas for innovation are pockets or areas that appear unattractive or inconsequential to industry incumbents and where there are people who would like to do something but cannot access the available offering. To improve education as an industry, businesspeople might consider investing in technological platforms that will allow for robust educational user networks to emerge. Closed for comment; 0 Comment(s) posted.