Peter Thiel: Seven Surprising Keys To Market-Creating Innovation

In his classic article, “The Capitalist’s Dilemma,” (HBR, June 2014) Clayton Christensen distinguished three kinds of innovation: performance-improving innovation, efficiency innovations and market-creating innovation. Market-creating innovations are the most important of these, because they usually generate whole new industries, new jobs and new economic growth. By contrast, performance-improving innovations either create few new jobs because they’re substitutive, or they destroy jobs through gains in productivity. To foster market-creating innovations, Christensen called for “new tools for managing the resources that are scarce and costly” such as talent and time.