The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Management of Innovation and Change)

It is this upward mobility that makes disruptive technologies so dangerous to established firms—and so attractive to entrants.

By approaching a disruptive business with the mindset that they can’t know where the market is, managers would identify what critical information about new markets is most necessary and in what sequence that information is needed.

simpler than prior approaches. 8 They offered less of what customers in established markets wanted and so could rarely be initially employed there. They offered a different package of attributes valued only in emerging markets remote from, and unimportant to, the mainstream.

sustaining technologies. Some sustaining technologies can be discontinuous or radical in character, while others are of an incremental nature. What all sustaining technologies have in common is that they improve the performance of established products, along the dimensions of performance that mainstream customers in major markets have historically

The early 5.25-inch drive makers found this application (one might even say that they enabled it) by trial and error, selling drives to whomever would buy them.

organization’s values, which are the criteria that managers and employees in the organization use when making prioritization decisions.

It made no sense for them to target capital investment at thin-slab casting, positioned as it was in the least-profitable, most price-competitive and commodity-like end of their business.

best at this, that is, they have well-developed systems for killing ideas that their customers don’t want.

financial analysts have a better intuition for the value of resources than for processes.