innovator's dilemma

name

Etymology

Described in the 1997 book The Innovator's Dilemma by American business consultant Clayton Christensen.

Definitions

  1. The observation that well-established companies tend to concentrate on improving existing…

    The observation that well-established companies tend to concentrate on improving existing products, leaving them vulnerable to new competitors and disruptive technologies.

    • Some of the best pre-mortems for Steve Ballmer, out-going CEO of Microsoft, have chalked up the company's problem to the "innovator's dilemma."
    • The generous reading of all this is that recent films and their creators became victims, essentially, of the innovator's dilemma: They got too good at obeying their own, once-successful formulas—and failed to see beyond them.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for innovator's dilemma. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA