Defining Disruptive Innovation (original) (raw)

Research-Technology Management, 2016

Abstract

Every profession has a vocabulary, a dictionary of words and phrases peculiar to its own context that defines what practitioners do, how they do it, even how they think about their work. These are terms of art, and they are the base on which a community is built; they are at the heart of our notions of expertise, and they are the foundation of clear thinking and effective discussion. This is no less true for innovation management than it is for any field. In the hundreds of papers I see every year as RTM's managing editor, and the many more I read in other venues, in print and online, it seems that researchers and practitioners struggle with the shared vocabulary of the field. Business in general is infamous for playing fast and loose with language--appropriating other communities' terms of art inappropriately, verb-ing nouns and noun-ing verbs in ways that make language purists shudder, creating new jargon when existing language will get the job done just fine. (1) But perhaps the worst tendency in the innovation management literature is the tendency of practitioners, thinkers, and researchers to defang their own terms of art, rendering them powerless to define or illustrate, by applying them everywhere and anywhere. When everything is disruptive, and all innovation is open, we're left with no tools to distinguish what may be important about a new tool, a new approach, a new concept. With the next several installments of this column, I'm going to take on some of these terms, exploring their origins and mapping their limitations. In looking at how the terms of art at the heart of innovation management have emerged and evolved, perhaps we can get a glimpse of where innovation is heading--and maybe we can restore the power of some important ideas. First up: disruptive innovation. The term disruptive innovation was introduced by Clayton Christensen, first in a 1995 Harvard Business Review article coauthored with Joseph L. Bower and then in his 1997 book, The Innovator's Dilemma. Christensen himself has modified both the specific terminology and its import; his first work focused on disruptive technology, but in The Innovator's Solution, his 2003 follow-up to The Innovator's Dilemma, coauthored with Michael E. Raynor, he shifts the focus. Technology itself is not inherently disruptive, Christensen now argues. Rather, Christensen has come to believe, what is disruptive is how and to whom value is delivered in the marketplace--it's the business model that makes an innovation disruptive. And often, the disruption is the business model--particularly when the disruption comes from the low end of the market and the technology itself may not be new at all (often, it's even inferior to existing solutions). As Christensen defines them, "disruptive innovations were technologically straightforward," offering "a different package of attributes" from those valued by the mainstream market. Disruptive innovators gain a foothold in the market either by creating a low-end product that appeals to customers for whom existing products are too much--too complex, too expensive, too difficult--or by addressing a set of customers overlooked or ignored by mainstream competitors. Alternately, disruptive innovations may shed sophistication in a domain where incumbents have overdelivered--how much does an incremental improvement in screen resolution matter to consumers?--in order to deliver a new attribute that incumbents aren't offering--for instance, a screen that is less likely to break or crack. An incumbent facing disruption must choose between clinging to its existing markets--likely not a real long-term choice--or risking its advantage on new technologies and new business models. Some companies try to have it both ways, by experimenting with disruptive concepts in separate business units or corporate incubators, or by acquiring upstart disruptors. Since its introduction, the concept of disruptive innovation has, to put it mildly, taken off. …

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