Disruption is defined in retrospect: disruptive innovations are those that disrupted.
Clayton Christensen's famous line of inquiry asked why well-run companies get disrupted by new technologies. By studying cases of disruption, he hoped to identify advance signals that managers in established companies could use to avoid disruption, or that startups could use to foster it.
Between the initial article and his death in 2020, Christensen refined his model many times. The core characteristics he identified were:
Christensen wanted these signals to predict disruption in advance, but it hasn't really worked. Perhaps that's because patterns, once identified, are learned by the next generation of business managers, who avoid getting disrupted for the old reasons and instead get disrupted for new ones.
If that's the case, then it should still benefit the manager to gain familiarity with all the old patterns. Practice in this line of thinking may help one to avoid or foster disruption.
technology, as used in this book, means the processes by which an organization transforms labor, capital, materials, and information into products and services of greater value
Innovation refers to a change in one of these technologies.
there is a strategically important distinction between what I call sustaining technologies and those that are disruptive. These concepts are very different from the incremental-versus-radical distinction that has characterized many studies of this problem.
Sustaining versus Disruptive Technologies
Most new technologies foster improved product performance. I call these sustaining technologies. Some sustaining technologies can be discontinuous or radical in character, while others are of an incremental nature. What all sustaining technologies have in common is that they improve the performance of established products, along the dimensions of performance that mainstream customers in major markets have historically valued. Most technological advances in a given industry are sustaining in character. An important finding revealed in this book is that rarely have even the most radically difficult sustaining technologies precipitated the failure of leading firms.Occasionally, however, disruptive technologies emerge: innovations that result in worse product performance, at least in the near-term. Ironically, in each of the instances studied in this book, it was disruptive technology that precipitated the leading firms' failure.
Disruptive technologies bring to a market a very different value proposition than had been available previously. Generally, disruptive technologies underperform established products in mainstream markets. But they have other features that a few fringe (and generally new) customers value. Products based on disruptive technologies are typically cheaper, simpler, smaller, and, frequently, more convenient to use.
2025-11-18