innovator's dilemma
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 1.55 in modern English
25
Scrabble Score
17
Letters
5
Syllables
12
Unique Chars
Meaning
name
The observation that well-established companies tend to concentrate on improving existing products, leaving them vulnerable to new competitors and disruptive technologies.
Example Sentences
- "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."
Etymology
Described in the 1997 book The Innovator's Dilemma by American business consultant Clayton Christensen.
Inflected Forms
the innovator's dilemma (canonical)