OUR HISTORY

That book, which then Intel CEO Andy Grove described as “lucid, analytical, and scary,” described how disruptive innovation could cause even the best-run companies to collapse. Corporate leaders saw both fear and hope in Clay’s work. They feared that they could suffer the same ignominious fate as Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), who was disrupted by the personal computer. They hoped that they could learn to deflect disruptive threats and seize disruptive opportunities.

Clay turned to a former student and strategy and innovation consultant Mark Johnson to create a firm dedicated to the practice and advancement of innovation. As Clay wrote in the foreword to The Innovator’s Guide to Growth, “I formed Innosight because I recognized a limitation in my own brain. Because the patterns of disruptive innovation are so crystal clear to me, I can underestimate the very real difficulty of actually creating new growth businesses, especially in large corporations.”

Over the past eight years, Innosight has grown significantly and with it the scope and impact of the original theories of disruption. In 2003, Clay published the best-selling follow up The Innovator’s Solution that offered companies a playbook for growth through innovation. Most recently, several senior partners of Innosight collaborated to produce The Innovator’s Guide to Growth to provide detailed “how to” steps to drive growth by identifying, nurturing, and commercializing innovative offerings.
 

Along the way, we have had the privilege of collaborating with key leaders and practitioners in a variety of industries and circumstances. Leading firms like Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, General Motors, Pepsi, SAP, Scripps Networks, and Motorola have all worked with us to apply these concepts to improve their own growth prospects and along the way have contributed greatly to the formalization of the tools, techniques and methodologies that form the basis of Innosight’s offerings today. We have created relationships with other innovation thought leaders, such as former McKinsey Director Richard Foster and Tuck Professor V.G. Govindarajan. We have assembled a diverse team passionate about and skilled in the art and practice of innovation.

Today, Innosight is a thriving consultancy with extended impact coming from three affiliated organizations: Innosight Ventures (funding and creating early stage disrupters), Innosight Labs (rapid, low cost prototyping of new concepts), and Innosight Institute, a non-profit think tank dedicated to applying Clay’s disruptive practices to the benefit of social sector issues.

Clay continues to work exclusively with Innosight and plays an active role in our day-to-day efforts through regular contributions to our IP and methods, and client engagements.