Clayton M. Christensen

Empowering innovations transform something that is complicated and expensive into something that is so much more simple and affordable that a much larger population can enjoy it. ”

In an environment where you've got to push innovations out the door fast and keep the cost of innovation low, the probability that you'll be successful is actually much higher. ”

There are three types of innovations that affect jobs and capital: empowering innovations, sustaining innovations and efficiency innovations. ”

Smart companies fail because they do everything right. They cater to high-profit-margin customers and ignore the low end of the market, where disruptive innovations emerge from. ”

In the universities, we teach you what we decide you need to know. And the employers find out when they hire people that students didn't learn what we needed them to learn. Online learning offerings, like the University of Phoenix, have relationships with employers and teach what you need to know. ”

In a healthy economy, empowering, sustaining and efficiency innovations operate in balance. A healthy economy creates and sustains more jobs before squeezing out inefficiencies. ”

There are direct paths to a successful career. But there are plenty of indirect paths, too. ”

When you improve your product so it does the customer's job better, then you gain market share. ”

We all have jobs in our lives that we must get done. We reach out and bring products into our lives to get these jobs done. Marketing is all about asking, 'What job is the customer trying to accomplish?' ”

As a general rule, if you have a product that doesn't get the job done that a customer is needing to get done, then often you have to offer it for zero. Because if you ask for money for it - because if it doesn't do the job well, they won't pay for it. ”