Nine Things Clay Christensen Thinks About Thinking

Excerpted from a Forbes.com article by Craig Hatkoff and Irwin Kula: Every April for the past five years Professor Clay Christensen has travelled to New York City to co-host the Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Awards—a collaboration between Christensen and the Disruptor Foundation (which he co-founded with us) and the Tribeca Film Festival.

Two dozen or so honorees are recognized at the awards for their achievements and efforts expanding the boundaries of Disruptive Innovation Theory. The selection of the honorees typically represent anomalies, outliers and black swans that Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation doesn’t quite accurately predict. Presented with  these diverse anomalies and exceptions helps  Christensen improve his theory.

Many of the honorees fall outside the traditional technological and industrial domains. These focus on innovations in non-traditional domains with seemingly intractable social problems such as healthcare, education, diplomacy, terrorism, parenting, capitalism and religion. At the conclusion of the award ceremony Christensen delivers a set of comments in real time reflecting on these anomalies and the next set of challenges and opportunities for disruptive innovation…

Read the full Forbes article online on the Off White Papers blog. Originally written by Craig Hatkoff and Irwin Kula and published on July 30th, 2015, the Off White Papers are part of Forbes’ Leadership section, contemplating the deeper, disruptive angles of historically and emerging innovations from healthcare and politics to arts and culture.