Disruptive technology

A disruptive technology is a new technological innovation, product, or service that eventually overturns the existing dominant technology in the market, despite the fact that the disruptive technology is both radically different than the leading technology and that it often initially performs worse than the leading technology according to existing measures of performance. A disruptive technology comes to dominate an existing market by either filling a role in a new market that the older technology could not fill (as more expensive, lower capacity but smaller-sized hard disks did for newly developed notebook computers in the 1980s) or by successively moving up-market through performance improvements until finally displacing the market incumbents (as digital photography has come to replace film photography).

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By contrast, sustaining technology refers to the successive incremental improvements to performance that market incumbents incorporate into their existing product.

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The term disruptive technology was coined by Clayton M. Christensen and described in his 1997 book The Innovator's Dilemma. In his sequel, The Innovator's Solution, Christensen replaced the term with the term disruptive innovation because he recognized that few technologies are intrinsically disruptive or sustaining in character. It is strategy that creates the disruptive impact.

Related Topics:
Clayton M. Christensen - 1997 - The Innovator's Dilemma

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