The Christensen Institute Innovation Summit
From Insight to Foresight: Designing What Comes Next
Join us for the inaugural Christensen Institute Innovation Summit: a closed-door, curated assembly designed to use Clayton Christensen’s evolving frameworks not just to understand disruption, but to anticipate it.
Most innovation gatherings celebrate what’s already happened. The Christensen Institute Innovation Summit is designed for what comes next.
On September 24, 2026, the Institute will convene 150–200 cross-sector leaders for the inaugural Christensen Institute Innovation Summit. The Summit is a closed-door, one-day assembly that deliberately moves from applying the world’s most rigorous innovation theory to something harder and rarer: using it to see what’s coming before it’s obvious.
The day is structured in three stages—Insight, System, Foresight—each building toward a sharper answer to the question every serious leader is quietly asking: Where does my industry break next, and am I positioned ahead of it?
What to Expect
Attendees don’t just attend sessions. Instead, they move through a curated experience designed to deliver:
Seating is deliberately capped. This is a curated room, assembled for depth over scale.
Who Attends?
The Summit draws leaders selected for their authority, not their availability, including innovation strategists and transformation executives; founders building at the edge of established markets; system shapers in education, healthcare, and global prosperity; long-horizon investors and capital allocators; and the next generation of leaders shaping what disruption looks like.
Interested in Sponsoring?
Partnership opportunities are available for the inaugural Summit, including a limited number of prestige tiers reserved for organizations that want to help shape what this community becomes from year one.
To receive more information, indicate your interest in sponsoring on the form below.
Stay in the Loop
The Summit Briefing is the best way to follow the inaugural Summit as it comes together — speaker announcements, agenda details, and registration information delivered directly to your inbox as soon as they’re available.
Seats are limited and will not be held.
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Event Schedule
Institute Welcome
The Map Isn’t Frozen: Why Theory Keeps Getting Sharper
9:00 AM – 9:40 AM
Clayton Christensen, our founder and namesake, believed good theory could help us understand cause and effect across changing circumstances. He never meant the theories he developed to be static. He searched for anomalies because he wanted ideas to be tested, applied in new contexts and sectors, challenged by new evidence, and improved over time.
In this opening keynote, Christensen Institute President & CEO Ann Christensen explores what it means to carry that work forward. From education and health care to economic development, technology, the changing world of work, and beyond, Christensen’s theories continue to offer powerful ways to understand why innovation succeeds, why established systems resist change, and where new opportunities emerge. At the same time, new technologies and challenges, such as AI, are creating new circumstances for applying and learning from these ideas.
Theory is valuable because it is useful and dynamic. The Christensen Institute keeps putting Clay’s theories to work, learning from what they reveal, extending them where needed, and helping today’s innovators anticipate what lies ahead.
- Ann Christensen, President & CEO, the Christensen Institute
Opening Keynote
Anomalies Wanted: Lessons from the Demand-Side
9:40 AM – 10:35 AM
It started with milkshakes. A dessert that didn’t behave the way the executives thought it should, and Bobby Moesta went looking for why.
Thirty years later, that instinct is the method. Bobby doesn’t avoid the cases that don’t fit; he hunts them. Anomalies are where the next insight lives, and they show up everywhere: B2B and B2C, healthcare and housing, software and steel. The patterns hold across sectors that share nothing else.
Through the stories and cases that shaped the work—Clay’s theory blended with Deming’s systems thinking and a few others—Bobby traces how the demand-side view keeps evolving, including where it’s headed next, and what Jobs to Be Done means in an age of AI.
If you want to see what’s coming, start with what doesn’t fit.
- Bobby Moesta, Distinguished Fellow, Jobs to Be Done, the Christensen Institute; CEO and founder of The Re-Wired Group
Morning Concurrent Sessions
Playing Chess in Handcuffs: Innovating Inside Regulated Industries
10:50 AM – 11:45 AM
Every innovation in healthcare has to clear compliance and liability, then compete against a system incentivized toward traditional business models. Director of Health Care Research, Ann Somers Hogg, opens the day’s first breakout with a direct question: How do you actually innovate, build, and scale under those conditions? So far, she’s joined by two people building inside exactly this kind of constraint:
- Benjamin Tingey, Director, Innovation and New Ventures, Advocate Health
- Brinleigh Murphy-Reuter, Founder and CEO, Science to People; Innovation Strategist, AI & Child Development, Boston Children’s Digital Wellness Lab
- Todd Dunn, Founder and CEO at The Innovators Journey
AI and the New Innovator’s Dilemma: Fostering Young Talent in a Changing Labor Market
10:50 AM – 11:45 AM
Clay Christensen’s innovator’s dilemma explains why successful organizations get blindsided by the very forces reshaping their industries. Today, a new version of that dilemma is unfolding—not in boardrooms, but at the bottom of the career ladder. As Generative AI increasingly outperforms new graduates on entry-level tasks, employers have less reason to hire, train, and mentor young talent—and the on-the-job learning that has long turned raw potential into skilled contributors is quietly disappearing. The risk isn’t just fewer first jobs; it’s a shrinking pipeline for discovering the next generation of innovators, disproportionately among those without existing access to networks and mentorship.
In this session, panelists join Director of Education Research, Julia Freeland Fisher, to examine this emerging dilemma through the lens of innovation theory: What happens when the traditional “job” as a training ground disappears? Who is best positioned to redesign the interface between education and work? And what does Disruptive Innovation Theory tell us about how new models of postsecondary learning might restore the on-ramps young people need to build skills, relationships, and career trajectories in an AI-saturated labor market?
- Connie Yowell, Executive Director, Center on Future of Higher Education and Work, Northeastern University
- Kathy Pugh, Leader, Academic and Operational Build, Project NEI
- Stig Leschly, Founder and President, the Postsecondary Commission
Fireside Chat
Theory in the Age of AI: What Changes, and What Doesn’t?
12:55 PM – 1:25 PM
Artificial intelligence is reshaping products, organizations, industries, and the way work gets done at extraordinary speed. As innovators grapple with its implications, a fundamental question is emerging: which forces are genuinely new, and which look familiar through the lens of Christensen’s theories?
In this fireside conversation, Christensen Institute cofounder Michael Horn and Senior Fellow Rich Alton explore what decades of research on disruption, business models, interdependence and modularity, and other theories can tell us about the rapid evolution of AI. Would Clay revise the theories to account for AI? Where do these frameworks help us see through the hype and better understand what is happening? What new questions does this moment invite us to ask?
Rather than trying to predict exactly where AI is headed, the conversation will explore how theory can help innovators make sense of a rapidly changing landscape—and what we may learn about the theories themselves along the way.
- Michael B. Horn, Co-Founder and Board Chair, the Christensen Institute
- Rich Alton, Strategic Advisor, Emerging Research, the Christensen Institute
Mid-Day Concurrent Sessions
The Price of Principle: Building Organizations that Hold Their Values Under Pressure
1:40 PM – 2:35 PM
Every organization answers to influences it doesn’t fully control: customers, investors, employees, suppliers, regulators. Those influences shape which products get built, which markets get pursued, and which growth opportunities look attractive. But their reach runs deeper than business strategy. Values face the same test: the ones that survive either fit those influences or can withstand them. Led by “Value Network” expert Thomas Arnett, this panel brings together executives who’ve led organizations under that pressure to discuss how to keep the people and incentives around a company from overriding what it says it stands for. He’s joined by:
- Laura Davis, Co-founder and Co-CEO, Renew Capital
- Matthew Davis, Co-founder and Co-CEO, Renew Capital
- Paul Ahlstrom, Serial Entrepreneur and Angel Investor
- Rob Waldron, Chairman of the Board, Curriculum Associates
The Road Less Traveled: Disruption, Market Creation, and the Path to Prosperity
1:40 PM – 2:35 PM
Market-creating innovation doesn’t just improve what already exists. It turns nonconsumers into consumers, building new markets, jobs, and institutions along the way. It’s also, historically, the road least traveled. Director of Global Prosperity Research, Efosa Ojomo, leads a conversation on whether AI changes that calculus, joined by:
- Sheriff Abdullahi, Managing Director, MSD (Merck & Co.) Saudi Arabia
- Kola Aina, Founding Partner, Ventures Platform
- Chinua Azubike, CEO, InfraCredit
- Sergio Restrepo, VP of Corporate Strategy, Luker Group
Four vantage points from health care, venture capital, infrastructure finance, and corporate strategy discuss the same hard problem: why prosperity-building innovation is so rare, and what it would take to make it common in this evolving era.
Afternoon Concurrent Sessions
Building a New Normal: What Will It Take for New School Models to Become Mainstream and Widespread?
2:45 PM – 3:40 PM
Education seems ready for an inflection point. AI is transforming the world, the path to a comfortable middle-class life has narrowed, and student academic success has stalled. More than ever, K–12 education needs to help all students find their paths to opportunity. Yet conventional approaches to education remain deeply entrenched in a mid-20th-century model. Senior Fellow of Education Research, Thomas Arnett, brings together leaders working outside that default to examine where they find degrees of freedom to innovate, what constraints they still operate under, and what it will take for new and better models of education to become the norm rather than niche alternatives. He’s joined by:
- Kerry McDonald, Director, Education Entrepreneurship Lab, Foundation for Economic Education
- Matthew Spengler, Superintendent, Felix Commonwealth Virtual School
- Nick Chapman, Founding Director of Potential and Pathways, Boston Public Schools
- Raphael Gang, Director, K12 Education, Stand Together Trust
Innovation in Action: Lessons from the Front Lines
2:45 PM – 3:40 PM
Theory is easy to admire from a distance. It’s harder to live inside, especially when you’re the one deciding what to build, what to defend, or what to bet on next. This panel puts three leaders in three very different positions in that same story.
Mel Torrie bootstrapped Autonomous Solutions from a university robotics lab, using one slide from the Innovator’s Dilemma to raise over $1 billion as he built a world-leading autonomous vehicle company serving the agriculture, mining, construction, materials handling, and logistics industries. Amir Kaiser is with Amdocs, a company that has helped power the infrastructure behind the world’s telecom carriers for over four decades. He is now navigating how an established industry leader innovates amid rapid technological change—the innovator’s dilemma from the incumbent’s seat. Rahul Mehendale is a former student of Clay’s and a longtime entrepreneur and strategist. He carried these frameworks with him from Deloitte to building mySkin, back to Deloitte to help shape its work on disruptive innovation and the future of health, and now into his latest venture, Live150.ai—using theory not as a one-time playbook but as a way to recognize patterns and navigate uncertainty.
Ann Christensen moderates, tracing how the same theories look completely different depending on which seat you’re sitting in, and what it actually takes to act on it when the stakes are your own company.
- Amir Kaiser, Division President, amAIz – Gen AI and Data, Amdocs
- Mel Torrie, Founder & CEO, Autonomous Solutions
- Rahul Mehendale, Founder & CEO, Live150.ai
Closing Reflection
Closing Reflection: Where Do We Go from Here?
4:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Clayton Christensen taught us that theory is more than a set of ideas. It’s a way of thinking, grounded in causality, attentive to anomalies, and anticipating what lies just beyond the horizon.
In this closing roundtable, Ann Christensen, Michael B. Horn, and Bobby Moesta reflect on what we have learned from Clay’s work, how the theories are evolving, and what it means to steward a body of ideas that was never intended to stand still. Drawing on questions submitted by attendees throughout the Summit, they’ll revisit themes and tensions that have surfaced during the day and discuss where the work goes from here.
Ultimately, stewarding these ideas is about more than preserving or even advancing theory. It’s about building a community of people who use theory to make wiser choices, lead better, tackle bigger problems, and live more fulfilling lives.
- Ann Christensen, President & CEO, the Christensen Institute
- Bobby Moesta, Distinguished Fellow, Jobs to Be Done, the Christensen Institute; CEO and founder of The Re-Wired Group
- Michael B. Horn, Co-Founder and Board Chair, the Christensen Institute
