Clayton Christensen

Foremost Authority on Disruptive Innovation; Professor, Harvard Business School

SNAPSHOT BIO

Clayton M. Christensen is the Robert and Jane Cizik Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, with a joint appointment in the Technology & Operations Management and General Management faculty groups. He is the author or coauthor of six books including the New York Times bestsellers The Innovator's Dilemma and The Innovator's Solution. In 2008, he released Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, a groundbreaking examination of America's education system through the lens of disruption. His forthcoming book, The Innovator's Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care, applies the principles of disruption to the nation's broken health care system.

Professor Christensen’s research and teaching interests center on managing innovation and how to create new growth markets. Through co-founding Innosight, a management consulting and training firm based near the Harvard Business School in Watertown, Massachusetts, Professor Christensen and his colleagues sought to make practical the theories of disruption by focusing on problems of strategy, innovation and growth. Professor Christensen’s theories of disruptive innovation are practiced and implemented today through the company’s work with clients ranging from Proctor & Gamble to Johnson & Johnson to Best Buy to Time Warner.

Professor Christensen holds a B.A. with highest honors in economics from Brigham Young University (1975), and an M.Phil. in applied econometrics and the economics of less-developed countries from Oxford University (1977), where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. He received an MBA with High Distinction from the Harvard Business School in 1979, graduating as a George F. Baker Scholar. He was awarded his DBA from the Harvard Business School in 1992.

A seasoned entrepreneur, Professor Christensen has founded three successful companies. The first, CPS Corporation, is an advanced materials manufacturing company that he founded in 1984 with several MIT professors. The second, Innosight, was founded by Professor Christensen with the company’s current chairman, Mark Johnson, in 2000. Innosight Capital, the third firm, was launched in 2005. Christensen is also a co-founder of Rose Park Advisors, an investment firm, and Innosight Institute, a non-profit think tank.

From 1979 to 1984, Professor Christensen worked with the Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In 1982 he was named a White House Fellow, and served as assistant to U.S. Transportation Secretaries Drew Lewis and Elizabeth Dole. He became a faculty member at the Harvard Business School in 1992.

Professor Christensen’s seminal work, The Innovator’s Dilemma received the Global Business Book Award for the best business book published in 1997, and The Innovator's Solution was also a New York Times best seller. His two most recent works – Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, and The Innovator’s Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care – examine the problems of our public education and healthcare systems through the lenses of his theories and show how the problems in these industries can be resolved. He is also the author of Seeing What’s Next and the editor of two case books on innovation: Innovation and the General Manager and Strategic Management of Technology and Innovation.

Professor Christensen's writings have won a number of additional awards, including the Best Dissertation Award from The Institute of Management Sciences; the Production and Operations Management Society's William Abernathy Award for the best paper in the management of technology; the Newcomen Society’s award for the best paper in business history; and the 1995 and 2001 McKinsey Awards for articles published in the Harvard Business Review.

Professor Christensen was born in Salt Lake City, Utah. He worked as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in the Republic of Korea from 1971 to 1973 and speaks fluent Korean. He currently serves his church as an Area Authority Seventy, and recently published an essay about his beliefs, entitled “Why I Believe”.