Disruptive Innovation - History and Usage of The Term

History and Usage of The Term

The term disruptive technologies was coined by Clayton M. Christensen and introduced in his 1995 article Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave, which he co-wrote with Joseph Bower. The article is aimed at managing executives who make the funding/purchasing decisions in companies rather than the research community. He describes the term further in his book The Innovator's Dilemma. Innovator's Dilemma explored the cases of the disk drive industry (which, with its rapid generational change, is to the study of business what fruit flies are to the study of genetics, as Christensen was advised in the 1990s) and the excavating equipment industry (where hydraulic actuation slowly displaced cable-actuated movement). In his sequel with Michael E Raynor, The Innovator's Solution Christensen replaced the term disruptive technology with disruptive innovation because he recognized that few technologies are intrinsically disruptive or sustaining in character; rather, it is the business model that the technology enables that creates the disruptive impact. However, Christensen's evolution from a technological focus to a business modelling focus is central to understanding the evolution of business at the market or industry level. Christensen and Mark W. Johnson described the dynamics of "business model innovation" in the 2008 Harvard Business Review article "Reinventing Your Business Model". The concept of disruptive technology continues a long tradition of the identification of radical technical change in the study of innovation by economists, and the development of tools for its management at a firm or policy level.

In keeping with the insight that what matters economically is the business model, not the technological sophistication itself, Christensen's theory explains why many disruptive innovations are not "advanced technologies", which the technology mudslide hypothesis would lead one to expect. Rather, they are often novel combinations of existing off-the-shelf components, applied cleverly to a small, fledgling value network.