---
title: Clayton M. Christensen
type: entity
tags: [jtbd, disruption-theory, hbs, innovation]
sources:
  - "[[sources/2016-christensen-jobs-to-be-done]]"
  - "[[sources/2025-christensen-institute-jtbd-theory]]"
created: 2026-04-20
updated: 2026-04-20
---

# 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:

1. **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).
2. **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.
3. **The condo / milkshake / SNHU / American Girl cases** that anchor the theory in managerial memory.
4. **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.

## Related

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