The Innovator's Next Best Seller?

Just as kids await the latest Harry Potter installment, so do business leaders look for Clayton M. Christensen's next offering. In Seeing What's Next, which is due out this month, the Harvard Business School professor and co-authors Scott D. Anthony and Erik A. Roth explain how to spot industry-changing innovation. We recently asked Christensen about the great, good fun that is creative destruction.

Inc.: In the book, you tell companies to look at the most unsophisticated customers for ideas. Have early adopters lost their cachet?

Christensen: Really smart companies need to pay attention to all customer groups, but paying too much attention to early adopters can cause a company to miss disruptive developments occurring at the low end of the market or on the fringe. And they are what really drive industry change. That's why smart companies pay attention to the least demanding customers in their core market and to people outside the core market.

Q: Do successful, innovative companies have to worry about innovation too? ...