Clayton Christensen
2011 Ranking: #1
Winner: 2011 Thinkers50 Innovation Award
Clayton M. Christensen is the Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, and is widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost experts on innovation and growth.
Christensen is the bestselling author of a number of books: his seminal work, The Innovator's Dilemma (1997) which received the Global Business Book Award for the best business book of the year; The Innovator’s Solution (2003); Seeing What’s Next (2004); Disrupting Class (2008) looks at the root causes of why schools struggle and offers solutions; The Innovator's Prescription (2009) examines how to fix the US healthcare system; The Innovators’ DNA (2011); and The Innovative University (2011).
Christensen and his writings have won a number of awards, including five McKinsey Awards for articles published in the Harvard Business Review.
Christensen became a faculty member at the Harvard Business School in 1992, and was awarded a full professorship with tenure in 1998, becoming the first professor in the school’s modern history to achieve tenure at such an accelerated pace.
In 2000, Christensen founded Innosight, a consulting firm that uses his theories to help companies create new growth businesses. Christensen is also the founder of Innosight Institute, a non-profit think tank whose mission is to apply his theories to vexing societal problems such as healthcare and education.
Christensen has advised the executives of many of the world’s major corporations. They generate tens of billions of dollars in revenues every year from product and service innovations that were inspired by his research.
