Where does disruptive innovation collide?

Bower and Christensen's 1995 Disruptive technologies: Catching the wave and Christensen's 1997 The Innovator's Dilemma defined disruptive innovation as one specific process: a smaller firm with fewer resources enters at the low end of a market or in a new market with an offering that established customers first dismiss because it is cheaper, simpler, or lower performing, then improves it until it displaces the incumbent. It was set against sustaining innovation, which makes good products better for a firm's existing, most demanding customers. The referent here is a precise trajectory of competition and business model, and it is not a synonym for any large, sudden, or dramatic change in a market, nor is it the same as an innovation being technically radical.[1][2]

Unit

One entrant firm's foothold-to-mainstream trajectory against established rivals

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Traced through case histories of industries where entrants displaced incumbents, using footholds, performance trajectories, and margins

Christensen, Raynor, and McDonald's 2015 What is disruptive innovation? revisited the theory two decades on and drew tighter boundaries around it, arguing that many innovations widely called disruptive do not actually fit. They held, for example, that Uber was a sustaining rather than a disruptive innovation, because it did not begin at the low end or in a genuinely new market. This meaning is the same theory as the original, now defended against loose application: it insists that disruption names one particular pathway and that calling every successful upstart disruptive drains the word of meaning. It refines rather than replaces the 1990s statement, and it stands in direct opposition to the popular usage it was written to correct.[3]

Unit

A test of whether a given case fits the defined disruptive pathway

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Applied by checking a case against the theory's markers: a low-end or new-market foothold, initially inferior performance, and later movement upmarket

In business writing and everyday speech, disruption has broadened to mean almost any big, sudden change that upends an industry, a leading firm, or an established way of doing business, whatever the mechanism behind it. This meaning departs from the theory: it covers breakthrough products aimed at high-end buyers, price wars, and platform shifts alike, none of which need to begin below the incumbents. Markides's 2006 Disruptive innovation: In need of better theory and Christensen, Raynor, and McDonald's 2015 clarification both flagged that the label had been stretched across phenomena the theory never described. Treated honestly, this is a real and very common meaning of the words, but it is not the same construct as Christensen's, and evidence about one meaning says little about the other.[4][3]

Unit

A market shakeup, however caused, called disruptive in general usage

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Not formally measured; applied loosely in commentary to any change judged large or threatening to established firms