DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION by Clayton M. Christensen

“Innovators who want to disrupt in the US or Europe have to just be very mindful that, ‘I need to target my innovation to find non-consumption.’ So, as a good example: electric vehicles. If you tried to make an electric vehicle performance-competitive with internal combustion engines on the California freeway—it is very expensive. There’s a company trying to do that now call Tesla motors, and their cars cost about a hundred thousand dollars. At that level, it will never make any kind of a meaningful impact on our carbon footprint or our economic growth.

But you could take the same technology and, as you look around America—with the question on your mind—‘where is there non-consumption of automobiles?’ And as a question that relates to disruption is, ‘Is there a set of customers out there that would be delighted to have a car that wouldn't cruise far and won't go very fast?’ And the answer to both of those questions is, ‘The parents of suburban teenagers would love to have a car that cost 8k that wouldn’t go over 30mph and wouldn’t cruise more than 50 miles,’ you know?

And if, instead of making high-speed cars that will go on the California freeway, where if you sell one electric car you don’t sell one gas car—if they’d go after this market—and, they’re not so much selling cars as they are selling fashion statements to teenagers—who could drive their electric vehicle to high school, go see their friends, bring it home, plug it in overnight—that would create substantial economic growth. And then the technology would get better and better and, ultimately, begin to substitute for gasoline power.

So there’s still some, you know, really interesting disruptive opportunities in America but, you gotta think about it because it’s not just staring you in the face.”