2.1.1 Disruptive Innovations
In Clayton Christiansen’s book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, the argument is made that businesses are threatened by “ disruptive innovations,” which are new approaches that come up from under their radar. Ironically, the businesses that pay the most vulnerable to such threats, because the needs of those customers and channels are not well satisfied by the innovation in its early stages.
Familiar examples of disruptive technologies include the personal computer, which is an obvious success, and the electric vehicle, which has great potential but has not yet really broken out. A large part of Christiansen’s book focuses on the history of specific products, such as steam shovels and disk drives , that offer detailed examples of successive cycles of disruption.
The disk drive story, for instance, is mostly one of smaller and less capable drives finding new functions, solving new sorts of problems, and then growing up to replace the larger, previous generation.