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No idea for a new growth business ever comes fully shaped. When it emerges, it's half-baked, and it then goes through a process of becoming fully shaped.
Clayton M. Christensen
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Interpretation

What this quote means

New business ideas are often incomplete and require refinement over time.

This quote emphasizes that innovative business concepts are rarely perfect when they first appear. Instead, they often begin as rough ideas that need to be developed, tested, and refined through various stages until they achieve their full potential. This process highlights the importance of perseverance, adaptability, and continual improvement in the entrepreneurial journey.

Themes

BusinessInnovationGrowthDevelopmentEntrepreneurship

In practice

Example use cases

During a startup pitch, use this quote to illustrate the importance of iteration in business ideas.

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Companies, in fact, are specifically organized to under-invest in disruptive innovations! This is one reason why we often suggest that companies set up separate teams or groups to commercialize disruptive innovations. When disruptive innovations have to fight with other innovations for resources, they tend to lose out.
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There is no evidence that success in business will make us happy people or allow us to have happy families.
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By definition, big data cannot yield complicated descriptions of causality. Especially in healthcare. Almost all of our diseases occur in the intersections of systems in the body.
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The breakthrough innovations come when the tension is greatest and the resources are most limited. That's when people are actually a lot more open to rethinking the fundamental way they do business.
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