Clayton M. Christensen

Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School (until his death in 2020); founder of the Christensen Institute (think-tank for disruption and JTBD research). Author of The Innovator's Dilemma (1997) — the canonical disruption-theory text — and Competing Against Luck (2016, with Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, David S. Duncan) — the canonical Jobs-to-Be-Done popularisation.

In the wiki

sources/2016-christensen-jobs-to-be-done — "Know Your Customers' Jobs to Be Done" (HBR 2016, the article version of Competing Against Luck).
sources/2025-christensen-institute-jtbd-theory — the institute's canonical JTBD page.
sources/2025-christensen-institute-jtbd-3-considerations — institute infographic.
frameworks/jtbd — JTBD as a framework (Christensen is lead of the narrative strand; Ulwick leads the quantitative/ODI strand).

Contribution to JTBD

Christensen did not invent JTBD — Theodore Levitt (1960, "Marketing Myopia") and Anthony Ulwick (mid-1990s) precede him — but he popularised it for a managerial and strategic audience by:

Framing JTBD as a complement to disruption theory. Disruption explains competitive response; JTBD explains the causal driver of purchase (sources/2016-christensen-jobs-to-be-done, p. 4).
Narrative-first methodology. Buyer timelines, the "struggling moment" (Bob Moesta), emotional/social forces — less syntactically strict than Ulwick's ODI, higher bandwidth for qualitative insight.
The condo / milkshake / SNHU / American Girl cases that anchor the theory in managerial memory.
Institutionalisation via the Christensen Institute and the HBS Forum for Growth & Innovation.

Co-authors on the 2016 HBR article

Taddy Hall — principal at the Cambridge Group; led Nielsen Breakthrough Innovation Project.
Karen Dillon — former editor, Harvard Business Review.
David S. Duncan — senior partner at Innosight.

entities/tony-ulwick — the quantitative-strand counterpart; Christensen credited Ulwick in HBR Jan 2002.
frameworks/jtbd · concepts/outcome-driven-innovation