The Harvard Business School professor and author of The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail died in Boston on Thursday due to complications from cancer treatment. (Deseret News)

Talking point: Christensen was widely revered as the most influential thinker in Silicon Valley, with CEOs including Apple’s Steve Jobs and Intel’s Andy Grove praising his theoretical work exploring how successful legacy companies become vulnerable to upstarts. He had served as a professor at Harvard Business School since 1992, writing 10 books including The Innovator’s Dilemma, which Grove called the most important book he’d read in a decade. In 2012, Thinkers50 named Christensen the world’s most influential living management thinker. That same year, he and The Logic’s CEO and editor-in-chief David Skok co-authored a report on disruption in media, in which they examined changes to the traditional media landscape and options for how the industry can adapt to survive.