Radical US business thinker coming to NZ

Clayton Christensen claims great companies often fail because they spend too much time trying to do everything right.

An American academic who is considered to be one of the world's most influential business thinkers will be speaking in New Zealand next month.

Harvard Business professor Clayton Christensen is best known in global business circles for his radical theory about why great companies so often crash and burn.

His theory of 'disruptive innovation' argues that many successful companies fail because they try to do everything right.

Instead of adopting new technologies and business models to meet customers' future needs, they focus entirely on meeting customers' current needs.

Eventually, 'disruptive innovations' sneak in at the bottom of the market and overtake the big competitors.

"An innovation that is disruptive allows a whole new population of consumers at the bottom of a market access to a product or service that was historically only accessible to consumers with a lot of money or a lot of skill," Christensen says on his website.

Examples include the way cellular phones disrupted fixed line telephony, and personal computers disrupted mainframe and mini computers.

Christensen introduced the theory of disruptive innovation in his best-selling book 'The Innovator's Dilemma', first published in 1997.

The book was named by The Economist in 2011 as one of the six most important books about business ever written.

Christensen, has gone on to write nine books and more than a hundred articles.

The company bringing him to New Zealand claims Christensen's work had influenced the likes of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and Intel boss Andy Grove.

Christensen will deliver a seminar for business leaders in New Zealand on November 4 at the Sky City Convention Centre in Auckland.