THE BIG IDEA
WHAT IS
44 Harvard Business Review December 2015
HBR.ORG
Clayton M. Christensen is
the Kim B. Clark Professor
of Business Administration
at Harvard Business
School. Michael Raynor
is a director at Deloitte
Consulting LLP. Rory
McDonald is an assistant
professor at Harvard
Business School.
Twenty years after the
introduction of the
theory, we revisit
what it does—and
doesn’t—explain.
BY CLAYTON M.
CHRISTENSEN,
MICHAEL RAYNOR,
AND RORY MCDONALD
December 2015 Harvard Business Review 45
THE BIG IDEA WHAT IS DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION?
he theory of disruptive
innovation, introduced
in these pages in 1995,
has proved to be a
powerful way of thinking about
innovation-driven growth.
Many leaders of small,
entrepreneurial companies
praise it as their guiding star;
so do many executives at
large, well-established
organizations, including Intel,
Southern New Hampshire
University, and Salesforce.com.
Unfortunately, disruption theory is in danger of
becoming a victim of its own success. Despite broad
dissemination, the theory’s core concepts have
been widely misunderstood and its basic tenets frequently misapplied. Furthermore, essential refinements in the theory over the past 20 years appear to
have been overshadowed by the popularity of the
initial formulation. As a result, the theory is sometimes criticized for shortcomings that have already
been addressed.
There’s another troubling concern: In our experience, too many people who speak of “disruption”
have not read a serious book or article on the subject.
Too frequently, they use the term loosely to invoke
the concept of innovation in support of whatever it is
they wish to do. Many researchers, writers, and consultants use “disruptive innovation” to describe any
situation in which an industry is shaken up and previously successful incumbents stumble. But that’s
much too broad a usage.
46 Harvard Business Review December 2015
The problem with conflating a disruptive innovation with any breakthrough that changes an
industry’s competitive patterns is that different
types of innovation require different strategic approaches. To put it another way, the lessons we’ve
learned about succeeding as a disruptive innovator
(or defending against a disruptive challenger) will
not apply to every company in a shifting market.
If we get sloppy with our labels or fail to integrate
insights from subsequent research and experience
into the original theory, then managers may end
up using the wrong tools for their context, reducing their chances of success. Over time, the theory’s
usefulness will be undermined.
This article is part of an effort to capture the state
of the art. We begin by exploring the basic tenets of
disruptive innovation and examining whether they
apply to Uber. Then we point out some common
pitfalls in the theory’s application, how these arise,
and why correctly using the theory matters. We go
on to trace major turning points in the evolution of
our thinking and make the case that what we have
learned allows us to more accurately predict which
businesses will grow.
First, a quick recap of the idea: “Disruption” describes a process whereby a smaller company with
fewer resources is able to successfully challenge
established incumbent businesses. Specifically, as
incumbents focus on improving their products
and services for their most demanding (and usually
most profitable) customers, they exceed the needs
of some segments and ignore the needs of others.
Entrants that prove disruptive begin by successfully targeting those overlooked segments, gaining a
foothold by delivering more-suitable functionality—
frequently at a lower price. Incumbents, chasing
higher profitability in more-demanding segments,
tend not to respond vigorously. Entrants then move
upmarket, delivering the performance that incumbents’ mainstream customers require, while preserving the advantages that drove their early success.
When mainstream customers start adopting the entrants’ offerings in volume, disruption has occurred.
(See the exhibit “The Disruptive Innovation Model.”)
Is Uber a Disruptive Innovation?
Let’s consider Uber, the much-feted transportation
company whose mobile application connects consumers who need rides with drivers who are willing
to provide them. Founded in 2009, the company has
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Idea in Brief
THE ISSUE
The ideas summed up in the
phrase “disruptive innovation”
have become a powerful part
of business thinking—but
they’re in danger of losing
their usefulness because
they’ve been misunderstood
and misapplied.
THE RESPONSE
The leading authorities
on disruptive innovation
revisit the central tenets
of disruption theory, its
development over the past
20 years, and its limitations.
enjoyed fantastic growth (it operates in hundreds of
cities in 60 countries and is still expanding). It has
reported tremendous financial success (the most
recent funding round implies an enterprise value in
the vicinity of $50 billion). And it has spawned a slew
of imitators (other start-ups are trying to emulate its
“market-making” business model). Uber is clearly
transforming the taxi business in the United States.
But is it disrupting the taxi business?
According to the theory, the answer is no. Uber’s
financial and strategic achievements do not qualify
the company as genuinely disruptive—although the
company is almost always described that way. Here
are two reasons why the label doesn’t fit.
Disruptive innovations originate in low-end
or new-market footholds. Disruptive innovations
THE BOTTOM LINE
Does it matter whether Uber,
say, is a disruptive innovation
or something else entirely?
It does: We can’t manage
innovation effectively if we
don’t grasp its true nature.
copiers, offering an affordable solution to individuals and small organizations—and a new market was
created. From this relatively modest beginning, personal photocopier makers gradually built a major
position in the mainstream photocopier market that
Xerox valued.
A disruptive innovation, by definition, starts
from one of those two footholds. But Uber did not
originate in either one. It is difficult to claim that the
company found a low-end opportunity: That would
have meant taxi service providers had overshot the
needs of a material number of customers by making cabs too plentiful, too easy to use, and too clean.
Neither did Uber primarily target nonconsumers—
people who found the existing alternatives so expensive or inconvenient that they took public transit or
drove themselves instead: Uber was launched in San
Francisco (a well-served taxi market), and Uber’s
customers were generally people already in the habit
of hiring rides.
Uber has quite arguably been increasing total
demand—that’s what happens when you develop
a better, less-expensive solution to a widespread
customer need. But disrupters start by appealing to
low-end or unserved consumers and then migrate to
the mainstream market. Uber has gone in exactly the
opposite direction: building a position in the mainstream market first and subsequently appealing to
historically overlooked segments.
are made possible because they get started in two
types of markets that incumbents overlook. Lowend footholds exist because incumbents typically
try to provide their most profitable and demanding
customers with ever-improving products and services, and they pay less attention to less-demanding
customers. In fact, incumbents’ offerings often overshoot the performance requirements of the latter.
This opens the door to a disrupter focused (at first)
on providing those low-end customers with a “good
enough” product.
In the case of new-market footholds, disrupters create a market where none existed. Put simply,
they find a way to turn nonconsumers into consumDisruptive innovations don’t catch on with
ers. For example, in the early days of photocopying
mainstream customers until quality catches
technology, Xerox targeted large corporations and
up to their standards. Disruption theory differcharged high prices in order to provide the perfor- entiates disruptive innovations from what are called
mance that those customers required. School librar- “sustaining innovations.” The latter make good prodians, bowling-league operators, and other small
ucts better in the eyes of an incumbent’s existing
customers, priced out of the market, made do with
customers: the fifth blade in a razor, the clearer TV
carbon paper or mimeograph machines. Then in
picture, better mobile phone reception. These imthe late 1970s, new challengers introduced personal
provements can be incremental advances or major
December 2015 Harvard Business Review 47
THE BIG IDEA WHAT IS DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION?
breakthroughs, but they all enable firms to sell more
products to their most profitable customers.
Disruptive innovations, on the other hand, are
initially considered inferior by most of an incum
bent’s customers. Typically, customers are not will
ing to switch to the new offering merely because it
is less expensive. Instead, they wait until its quality
rises enough to satisfy them. Once that’s happened,
they adopt the new product and happily accept its
lower price. (This is how disruption drives prices
down in a market.)
Most of the elements of Uber’s strategy seem to
be sustaining innovations. Uber’s service has rarely
been described as inferior to existing taxis; in fact,
many would say it is better. Booking a ride requires
just a few taps on a smartphone; payment is cash
less and convenient; and passengers can rate their
rides afterward, which helps ensure high standards.
Furthermore, Uber delivers service reliably and
punctually, and its pricing is usually competitive
with (or lower than) that of established taxi services.
And as is typical when incumbents face threats from
isrupters first appeal to
low-end or unserved
customers and then
migrate to the mainstream
market. Uber has gone in the
opposite direction: building
a position in the mainstream
market first and then appealing
to historically overlooked segments.
sustaining innovations, many of the taxi compa
nies are motivated to respond. They are deploying
competitive technologies, such as hailing apps, and
contesting the legality of some of Uber’s services.
Why Getting It Right Matters
Readers may still be wondering, Why does it matter
what words we use to describe Uber? The company
48 Harvard Business Review December 2015
has certainly thrown the taxi industry into disarray:
Isn’t that “disruptive” enough? No. Applying the
theory correctly is essential to realizing its benefits.
For example, small competitors that nibble away at
the periphery of your business very likely should be
ignored—unless they are on a disruptive trajectory,
in which case they are a potentially mortal threat.
And both of these challenges are fundamentally
different from efforts by competitors to woo your
bread-and-butter customers.
As the example of Uber shows, identifying true
disruptive innovation is tricky. Yet even executives
with a good understanding of disruption theory tend
to forget some of its subtler aspects when making
strategic decisions. We’ve observed four important
points that get overlooked or misunderstood:
1. Disruption is a process. The term “disrup
tive innovation” is misleading when it is used to refer
to a product or service at one fixed point, rather than
to the evolution of that product or service over time.
The first minicomputers were disruptive not merely
because they were low-end upstarts when they ap
peared on the scene, nor because they were later
heralded as superior to mainframes in many mar
kets; they were disruptive by virtue of the path they
followed from the fringe to the mainstream.
Most every innovation—disruptive or not—
begins life as a small-scale experiment. Disrupters
tend to focus on getting the business model, rather
than merely the product, just right. When they suc
ceed, their movement from the fringe (the low end
of the market or a new market) to the mainstream
erodes first the incumbents’ market share and then
their profitability. This process can take time, and
incumbents can get quite creative in the defense
of their established franchises. For example, more
than 50 years after the first discount department
store was opened, mainstream retail companies still
operate their traditional department-store formats.
Complete substitution, if it comes at all, may take
decades, because the incremental profit from stay
ing with the old model for one more year trumps
proposals to write off the assets in one stroke.
The fact that disruption can take time helps to
explain why incumbents frequently overlook dis
rupters. For example, when Netflix launched, in
1997, its initial service wasn’t appealing to most
of Blockbuster’s customers, who rented movies
(typically new releases) on impulse. Netflix had an
exclusively online interface and a large inventory of
PRODUCT PERFORMANCE
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THE DISRUPTIVE
INNOVATION MODEL
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movies, but delivery through the U.S. mail meant
selections took several days to arrive. The service appealed to only a few customer groups—movie buffs
who didn’t care about new releases, early adopters of
DVD players, and online shoppers. If Netflix had not
eventually begun to serve a broader segment of the
market, Blockbuster’s decision to ignore this competitor would not have been a strategic blunder: The
two companies filled very different needs for their
(different) customers.
However, as new technologies allowed Netflix
to shift to streaming video over the internet, the
company did eventually become appealing to
Blockbuster’s core customers, offering a wider selection of content with an all-you-can-watch, ondemand, low-price, high-quality, highly convenient
approach. And it got there via a classically disruptive
path. If Netflix (like Uber) had begun by launching a
service targeted at a larger competitor’s core market,
Blockbuster’s response would very likely have been
a vigorous and perhaps successful counterattack.
But failing to respond effectively to the trajectory
that Netflix was on led Blockbuster to collapse.
This diagram contrasts product
performance trajectories (the red
lines showing how products or
services improve over time) with
customer demand trajectories
(the blue lines showing customers’
willingness to pay for performance).
As incumbent companies introduce
higher-quality products or services
(upper red line) to satisfy the
high end of the market (where
profitability is highest), they
overshoot the needs of low-end
customers and many mainstream
customers. This leaves an opening
for entrants to find footholds in
the less-profitable segments that
incumbents are neglecting. Entrants
on a disruptive trajectory (lower red
line) improve the performance of
their offerings and move upmarket
(where profitability is highest
for them, too) and challenge the
dominance of the incumbents.
2. Disrupters often build business models
that are very different from those of incumbents. Consider the health care industry. General
practitioners operating out of their offices often rely
on their years of experience and on test results to
interpret patients’ symptoms, make diagnoses, and
prescribe treatment. We call this a “solution shop”
business model. In contrast, a number of convenient care clinics are taking a disruptive path by using what we call a “process” business model: They
follow standardized protocols to diagnose and treat
a small but increasing number of disorders.
One high-profile example of using an innovative business model to effect a disruption is Apple’s
iPhone. The product that Apple debuted in 2007 was
a sustaining innovation in the smartphone market: It
targeted the same customers coveted by incumbents,
and its initial success is likely explained by product
superiority. The iPhone’s subsequent growth is better explained by disruption—not of other smartphones but of the laptop as the primary access
point to the internet. This was achieved not merely
through product improvements but also through the
December 2015 Harvard Business Review 49
THE BIG IDEA WHAT IS DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION?
THE UBIQUITOUS
“DISRUPTIVE
INNOVATION”
“Disruptive innovation”
and “disruptive
technology” are now
part of the popular
business lexicon, as
suggested by the
dramatic growth in
the number of articles
using those phrases
in recent years.
ARTICLES
2,500
2,000
1,500
1,000
500
0
1998
2000
2002
2004
2006
2008
2010
2012
2014
SOURCE FACTIVA ANALYSIS OF A WIDE VARIETY OF ENGLISH-LANGUAGE PUBLICATIONS
introduction of a new business model. By building a
facilitated network connecting application developers with phone users, Apple changed the game. The
iPhone created a new market for internet access and
eventually was able to challenge laptops as mainstream users’ device of choice for going online.
3. Some disruptive innovations succeed;
some don’t. A third common mistake is to focus
on the results achieved—to claim that a company
is disruptive by virtue of its success. But success is
not built into the definition of disruption: Not every
disruptive path leads to a triumph, and not every triumphant newcomer follows a disruptive path.
For example, any number of internet-based retailers pursued disruptive paths in the late 1990s, but
only a small number prospered. The failures are not
evidence of the deficiencies of disruption theory;
they are simply boundary markers for the theory’s
application. The theory says very little about how
to win in the foothold market, other than to play
the odds and avoid head-on competition with
better-resourced incumbents.
If we call every business success a “disruption,”
then companies that rise to the top in very different ways will be seen as sources of insight into a
50 Harvard Business Review December 2015
common strategy for succeeding. This creates a danger: Managers may mix and match behaviors that are
very likely inconsistent with one another and thus
unlikely to yield the hoped-for result. For example,
both Uber and Apple’s iPhone owe their success to
a platform-based model: Uber digitally connects
riders with drivers; the iPhone connects app developers with phone users. But Uber, true to its nature
as a sustaining innovation, has focused on expanding its network and functionality in ways that make
it better than traditional taxis. Apple, on the other
hand, has followed a disruptive path by building
its ecosystem of app developers so as to make the
iPhone more like a personal computer.
4. The mantra “Disrupt or be disrupted”
can misguide us. Incumbent companies do
need to respond to disruption if it’s occurring, but
they should not overreact by dismantling a still-
profitable business. Instead, they should continue
to strengthen relationships with core customers
by investing in sustaining innovations. In addition,
they can create a new division focused solely on the
growth opportunities that arise from the disruption. Our research suggests that the success of this
new enterprise depends in large part on keeping
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it separate from the core business. That means that
for some time, incumbents will find themselves
managing two very different operations.
Of course, as the disruptive stand-alone business
grows, it may eventually steal customers from the
core. But corporate leaders should not try to solve
this problem before it is a problem.
What a Disruptive Innovation
Lens Can Reveal
It is rare that a technology or product is inherently
sustaining or disruptive. And when new technology is developed, disruption theory does not dictate
what managers should do. Instead it helps them
make a strategic choice between taking a sustaining
path and taking a disruptive one.
The theory of disruption predicts that when an
entrant tackles incumbent competitors head-on, offering better products or services, the incumbents
will accelerate their innovations to defend their
business. Either they will beat back the entrant by
offering even better services or products at comparable prices, or one of them will acquire the entrant.
The data supports the theory’s prediction that entrants pursuing a sustaining strategy for a standalone business will face steep odds: In Christensen’s
seminal study of the disk drive industry, only 6% of
sustaining entrants managed to succeed.
Uber’s strong performance therefore warrants explanation. According to disruption theory, Uber is an
outlier, and we do not have a universal way to account
for such atypical outcomes. In Uber’s case, we believe
that the regulated nature of the taxi business is a large
part of the answer. Market entry and prices are closely
controlled in many jurisdictions. Consequently, taxi
companies have rarely innovated. Individual drivers
have few ways to innovate, except to defect to Uber.
So Uber is in a unique situation relative to taxis: It can
offer better quality and the competition will find it
hard to respond, at least in the short term.
To this point, we’ve addressed only whether or
not Uber is disruptive to the taxi business. The limousine or “black car” business is a different story,
and here Uber is far more likely to be on a disruptive
path. The company’s UberSELECT option provides
more-luxurious cars and is typically more expensive
than its standard service—but typically less expensive than hiring a traditional limousine. This lower
price imposes some compromises, as UberSELECT
currently does not include one defining feature of
the leading incumbents in this market: acceptance
of advance reservations. Consequently, this offering
from Uber appeals to the low end of the limousine
service market: customers willing to sacrifice a measure of convenience for monetary savings. Should
Uber find ways to match or exceed incumbents’
performance levels without compromising its cost
and price advantage, the company appears to be
well positioned to move into the mainstream of the
limo business—and it will have done so in classically
disruptive fashion.
How Our Thinking About
Disruption Has Developed
Initially, the theory of disruptive innovation was
simply a statement about correlation. Empirical
findings showed that incumbents outperformed
entrants in a sustaining innovation context but underperformed in a disruptive innovation context.
The reason for this correlation was not immediately
evident, but one by one, the elements of the theory
fell into place.
ncumbent companies
should not overreact
to disruption by dismantling
a still-profitable business.
Instead they should strengthen
relationships with core
customers while also creating
a new division focused on
the growth opportunities that
arise from the disruption.
First, researchers realized that a company’s propensity for strategic change is profoundly affected
by the interests of customers who provide the resources the firm needs to survive. In other words, incumbents (sensibly) listen to their existing customers and concentrate on sustaining innovations as a
result. Researchers then arrived at a second insight:
December 2015 Harvard Business Review 51
THE BIG IDEA WHAT IS DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION?
Incumbents’ focus on their existing customers becomes institutionalized in internal processes that
make it difficult for even senior managers to shift
investment to disruptive innovations. For example,
interviews with managers of established companies
in the disk drive industry revealed that resource allocation processes prioritized sustaining innovations
(which had high margins and targeted large markets
with well-known customers) while inadvertently
starving disruptive innovations (meant for smaller
markets with poorly defined customers).
s there a novel technology or
business model that allows
entrants in higher education to
follow a disruptive path? The
answer seems to be yes, and the
enabling innovation is online learning.
Those two insights helped explain why incumbents rarely responded effectively (if at all)
to disruptive innovations, but not why entrants
eventually moved upmarket to challenge incumbents, over and over again. It turns out, however,
that the same forces leading incumbents to ignore
early-stage disruptions also compel disrupters
ultimately to disrupt.
What we’ve realized is that, very often, low-end
and new-market footholds are populated not by a
lone would-be disrupter, but by several comparable
entrant firms whose products are simpler, more convenient, or less costly than those sold by incumbents.
The incumbents provide a de facto price umbrella,
allowing many of the entrants to enjoy profitable
growth within the foothold market. But that lasts
only for a time: As incumbents (rationally, but mistakenly) cede the foothold market, they effectively
remove the price umbrella, and price-based competition among the entrants reigns. Some entrants
will founder, but the smart ones—the true disrupters—will improve their products and drive upmarket, where, once again, they can compete at the
margin against higher-cost established competitors.
52 Harvard Business Review December 2015
The disruptive effect drives every competitor—
incumbent and entrant—upmarket.
With those explanations in hand, the theory of
disruptive innovation went beyond simple correlation to a theory of causation as well. The key elements of that theory have been tested and validated
through studies of many industries, including retail,
computers, printing, motorcycles, cars, semiconductors, cardiovascular surgery, management education, financial services, management consulting,
cameras, communications, and computer-aided
design software.
Making sense of anomalies. Additional refinements to the theory have been made to address
certain anomalies, or unexpected scenarios, that
the theory could not explain. For example, we originally assumed that any disruptive innovation took
root in the lowest tiers of an established market—
yet sometimes new entrants seemed to be competing in entirely new markets. This led to the distinction we discussed earlier between low-end and
new-market footholds.
Low-end disrupters (think steel minimills and
discount retailers) come in at the bottom of the market and take hold within an existing value network
before moving upmarket and attacking that stratum
(think integrated steel mills and traditional retailers). By contrast, new-market disruptions take hold
in a completely new value network and appeal to
customers who have previously gone without the
product. Consider the transistor pocket radio and
the PC: They were largely ignored by manufacturers
of tabletop radios and minicomputers, respectively,
because they were aimed at nonconsumers of those
goods. By postulating that there are two flavors of
foothold markets in which disruptive innovation
can begin, the theory has become more powerful
and practicable.
Another intriguing anomaly was the identification of industries that have resisted the forces
of disruption, at least until very recently. Higher
education in the United States is one of these. Over
the years—indeed, over more than 100 years—new
kinds of institutions with different initial charters
have been created to address the needs of various
population segments, including nonconsumers.
Land-grant universities, teachers’ colleges, two-year
colleges, and so on were initially launched to serve
those for whom a traditional four-year liberal arts
education was out of reach or unnecessary.
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Many of these new entrants strived to improve
over time, compelled by analogues of the pursuit of
profitability: a desire for growth, prestige, and the
capacity to do greater good. Thus they made costly
investments in research, dormitories, athletic facilities, faculty, and so on, seeking to emulate moreelite institutions. Doing so has increased their level
of performance in some ways—they can provide
richer learning and living environments for students,
for example. Yet the relative standing of highereducation institutions remains largely unchanged:
With few exceptions, the top 20 are still the top 20,
and the next 50 are still in that second tier, decade
after decade.
Because both incumbents and newcomers are
seemingly following the same game plan, it is perhaps no surprise that incumbents are able to maintain their positions. What has been missing—until
recently—is experimentation with new models that
successfully appeal to today’s nonconsumers of
higher education.
The question now is whether there is a novel
technology or business model that allows new entrants to move upmarket without emulating the incumbents’ high costs—that is, to follow a disruptive
path. The answer seems to be yes, and the enabling
innovation is online learning, which is becoming
broadly available. Real tuition for online courses is
falling, and accessibility and quality are improving.
Innovators are making inroads into the mainstream
market at a stunning pace.
Will online education disrupt the incumbents’
model? And if so, when? In other words, will online education’s trajectory of improvement intersect with the needs of the mainstream market? We’ve come to realize that the steepness
of any disruptive trajectory is a function of how
quickly the enabling technology improves. In
the steel industry, continuous-casting technology improved quite slowly, and it took more than
40 years before the minimill Nucor matched the
revenue of the largest integrated steelmakers. In
contrast, the digital technologies that allowed
personal computers to disrupt minicomputers
improved much more quickly; Compaq was able to
increase revenue more than tenfold and reach parity
with the industry leader, DEC, in only 12 years.
Understanding what drives the rate of disruption
is helpful for predicting outcomes, but it doesn’t alter the way disruptions should be managed. Rapid
disruptions are not fundamentally different from any
others; they don’t have different causal mechanisms
and don’t require conceptually different responses.
Similarly, it is a mistake to assume that the strategies adopted by some high-profile entrants constitute a special kind of disruption. Often these are
simply miscategorized. Tesla Motors is a current
and salient example. One might be tempted to say
the company is disruptive. But its foothold is in the
high end of the auto market (with customers willing
to spend $70,000 or more on a car), and this segment
is not uninteresting to incumbents. Tesla’s entry, not
surprisingly, has elicited significant attention and investment from established competitors. If disruption
theory is correct, Tesla’s future holds either acquisition by a much larger incumbent or a years-long and
hard-fought battle for market significance.
We still have a lot to learn. We are eager to
keep expanding and refining the theory of disruptive
innovation, and much work lies ahead. For example,
universally effective responses to disruptive threats
remain elusive. Our current belief is that companies
should create a separate division that operates under the protection of senior leadership to explore
and exploit a new disruptive model. Sometimes this
works—and sometimes it doesn’t. In certain cases,
a failed response to a disruptive threat cannot be
attributed to a lack of understanding, insufficient
executive attention, or inadequate financial investment. The challenges that arise from being an incumbent and an entrant simultaneously have yet to
be fully specified; how best to meet those challenges
is still to be discovered.
Disruption theory does not, and never will, explain everything about innovation specifically or
business success generally. Far too many other
forces are in play, each of which will reward further
study. Integrating them all into a comprehensive
theory of business success is an ambitious goal, one
we are unlikely to attain anytime soon.
But there is cause for hope: Empirical tests show
that using disruptive theory makes us measurably
and significantly more accurate in our predictions
of which fledgling businesses will succeed. As an
ever-growing community of researchers and practitioners continues to build on disruption theory and
integrate it with other perspectives, we will come
to an even better understanding of what helps firms
innovate successfully.
HBR Reprint R1512B
December 2015 Harvard Business Review 53
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