Beyond Disruption

Disruption Clayton Christensen defines disruption in his classic book The Innovator's Dilemma. Disruptive technologies are cheaper than existing ones, perform poorly under dominant standards, but are superior in a way existing markets do not need. During his research, new players repeatedly disrupted the market by introducing smaller disk drives wi... See more

Disruption, as theorized by Clayton Christensen in the early 1990s, is a process by which a startup offers a lower-cost product that performs worse along standard dimensions of performance for a small subset of customers outside of the mainstream. The product gets adoption, though, because it performs better on a new dimension of performance that i... See more

This point cannot be emphasized enough: the Internet is the single most disruptive1 force of our lifetimes because it does not evolve existing ways of doing things, but completely smashes the assumptions underlying them — assumptions we often didn’t even realize existed.

Disruption as a strategy sucks If you read Christensen's book and want to start a company, what would you do? Christensen's theory cannot be used to create disruptive companies. While millions of people have read The Innovator's Dilemma, Christensen's theory is descriptive rather than prescriptive. Disruptions are apparent, but you don't know until... See more