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

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

One of these powerful downmarket voids occurred in the steel industry, for example, when entrant companies employing disruptive minimill process technology entered through low-end beachheads; they have attacked relentlessly upmarket ever since.

Rather, their employees have been trained to understand what is good for the company and what it takes to build a successful career within the company. Employees of great companies exercise initiative to serve customers and meet budgeted sales and profits. It is very difficult for a manager to motivate competent people to energetically and

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.

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

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.

Only those companies that carefully measure trends in how their mainstream customers use their products can catch the points at which the basis of competition will change in the markets they serve.

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.