Although often involving greater development expense, such sustaining investments appeared far less risky than investments in the disruptive technology: The customers existed,

The findings violate their intuitive sense that creating new markets is a genuinely risky business.

The first is in its processes—the methods by which people have learned to transform inputs of labor, energy, materials, information, cash, and technology into outputs of higher value.

because it is in its processes and values that the organization’s most fundamental capabilities lie.

Honda’s executives were eager to exploit the company’s low labor costs to export motorbikes to North America,

In retrospect, these were obvious markets for hard drives, but at the time, their ultimate size and significance were highly uncertain.

innovations were technologically straightforward. They generally packaged known technologies in a unique architecture and enabled the use of these products in applications where magnetic data storage and retrieval previously had not been technologically or economically feasible.

If history is any guide, companies that keep disruptive technologies bottled up in their labs, working to improve them until they suit mainstream markets, will not be nearly as successful as firms that find markets that embrace the attributes of disruptive technologies as they initially stand.

The properties of its products varied according to the metallurgical composition and impurities of the scrap. Hence, about the only market that minimill producers could address was that for steel reinforcing bars (rebars)—right at the bottom of the market in terms of quality, cost, and margins.