A brief description of the Clayton Christensen's concept of disruptive technology and how it helps us to understand why companies go bankrupt under conditions of technological change.
2. Christian Sandström holds a PhD from Chalmers
University of Technology, Sweden. He writes and speaks
about disruptive innovation and technological change.
3. Ever since Clayton
Christensen
published his book
’The innovator’s
dilemma’ in 1997 its
popularity has
increased every year.
4. The book has had a profound impact
on how both practitioners and
scholars think about innovation and
technological change.
41. The new generations of disk drive
emerged in a new value network – in low
end segments or in entirely new markets.
42. The fact that the new generation had a
worse storage capacity but offered new
performance attributes implied that they
prospered in new applications.
43. Eventually, the products became ’good
enough’ in terms of storage capacity and
then displaced the former generation.
46. Sustaining innovations are those
which mainstream customers
demand.
Those innovations which do not
satisfy current customers are
regarded as disruptive.
49. The disruptive innovation has:
Lower performance according to
what mainstream customers
want.
Other performance attributes
(smaller, simpler), which are not
valued by current customers that
makes it prosper in a new value
network.
50. Companies are
therefore ’held
captive’ by their
most profitable
customers –
who impose a
great indirect
control of the
resource
allocation
process inside
the firm.
51. If you throw a stick into the field, you haven’t forced
the dog to go and get it, but it would still do so.
52. You are fact in power, because you have something
that the dog wants.
53. In the same way, existing customers influence what
firms decide to do because they provide the
company with profitable revenues.
54. This mechanism helps us to understand how
companies may be misguided when
listening to their current customers.