Source: Clayton Christensen/Harvard Business School
Clayton Christensen’s framework reveals why disruption is structurally impossible for mature companies—and it has nothing to do with leadershipvision or corporate culture.
The framework maps business model evolution through three distinct phases: Creation, Sustaining Innovation, and Efficiency. Each phase demands different innovation types, metrics, and organizational language. Understanding this progression explains why established companies systematically reject market-creating opportunities.
In the creation phase, business models remain flexible, focused on job-to-be-done metrics with loose interdependencies between resources, processes, and profit formulas. Innovation is market-creating, and organizational language emphasizes customer problems.
During sustaining innovation, processes crystallize around income statement metrics. Language shifts to products, customers, and competitors. The business model becomes more rigid as success reinforces specific approaches.
In the efficiency phase, rigid modularity emerges as balance sheet ratios dominate decision-making. Cost optimization becomes the organizational religion, and every initiative is evaluated against efficiency metrics.
The Interdependency Trap
The framework’s crucial insight concerns interdependency lock-in. By the efficiency stage, connections between value proposition, resources, processes, and profit formula have evolved into constraints. These interdependencies aren’t design choices—they’re emergent properties of successful optimization.
Capital pressure accelerates this journey. Investor demands for returns push companies toward efficiency, making backward movement structurally impossible. The metrics, language, and systems that enabled success at scale now actively suppress market-creating innovation.
The Mechanical Explanation
This explains the innovator’s dilemma mechanically rather than culturally. Companies don’t fail at disruption because leaders lack vision—they fail because their business model interdependencies, performance metrics, and organizational language have co-evolved to reject anything that doesn’t speak the efficiency dialect.
Escaping requires building separate units with deliberately immature systems—not incubators within existing structures, but genuinely independent organizations operating under creation-phase metrics and language.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
