Team Profiles

Curtis Chan, Analyst

Meet Curtis

Curtis joined Innosight in July 2008 as an Analyst and has since worked on consulting projects in the automotive industry, evaluating product portfolios and developing targeting and positioning strategies for new products. He has also worked with medical device clients to assess the technology landscape and identify strategic opportunities, including opportunities in emerging markets. Curtis has been involved in research and writing for the Innosight publication Strategy & Innovation, comparing the disruptive potential of different companies and their product offerings as well as developing company IP with new builds on theories of disruptive innovation. Before coming to Innosight, Curtis conducted ethnographic research and wrote a Hoopes Prize-winning undergraduate thesis on the values of community, identity, and respect among break dancers in Boston. In college, he led the Harvard Breakers, a student street dance organization, as its president for two years, managing its members as well as producing and choreographing dance performances.

Curtis graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University with an A.B. in social anthropology and a secondary field in psychology. He became a member of the Phi Beta Kappa honor society his junior year.

Favorite Innovation

Nintendo’s Wii is my favorite instance of disruptive innovation, as it vividly exemplifies the major principles of our IP and like the iPod—another disruptive innovation—is a relevant technology in people’s lives all over the world. Swinging a little white stick around wildly to hit a virtual ball in Wii Tennis is an experience that countless individuals, many of whom would never have considered themselves gamers, can say they’ve had.

Nintendo turned the gaming industry on its head when it announced that the Wii was not going to focus on photorealistic graphics or raw processing power to compete with the PS3 or Xbox 360, but instead was going to emphasize changing the way people play games. By offering a system that was “good enough” in terms of graphics and processing power while being significantly cheaper, the Wii exhibited “low-end” disruptive innovation. At the same time, Nintendo’s plan of making it easier, more convenient, and more intuitive to play video games targeted people who had never played video games before—non-consumers. Soon enough, the Wii appeared in abundance in nursing homes all over the world, showing “new market” disruptive innovation: making consumers of non-consumers and creating markets where there had never been markets before.

Nintendo’s Wii reveals that even an incumbent as old and entrenched as Nintendo can change the game—in this case, by changing the way we play games—with the right ideas about disruptive innovation.

What Curtis Has Written

Aware of Awareness

MAY 13 2009
Disrupt-O-Meter: Last.fm vs. Pandora

AUG 20 2008