Defining disruptive innovations

Definitions and related terms

Despite of the difficulties related to definitions, scholars share the opinion that disruption is a process, not an event (Bower and Christensen, 1995; Danneels, 2004). This process starts, when a new technology with significant differences to existing technologies comes to the market (Bower and Christensen, 1995). This technology introduces completely new performance attributes but does not succeed in attributes valued by mainstream markets.

Thus, this technology does not attract the mainstream market. However, niche market finds it interesting. The technology is superior in new attributes and after a while, it reaches a sufficient level in old ones, too. At the same time, old technologies continue their development and begin to exceed the performance demanded by existing customers.

Bergek et al. (2013) call this performance overshooting. Because of this, the mainstream market starts to adopt the disruptive technology, too. Thus, customer value emphasis

changes from old attributes to new ones. Eventually the new technology displaces the old ones (Adner, 2002) and hence, disrupts the market (Bower and Christensen, 1995). How-ever, it is important to notice that this is the case only with successful disruptive technol-ogies – sometimes they can fail, too (Danneels, 2004).

Bower and Christensen (1995) use hard-disk drives as an example of disruptive technol-ogies. In this industry, disk drive capacity was the main attribute valued by existing cus-tomers. However, the industry faced disruption several times, when the diameter of the drives first dropped from 14 inches to 8 inches, then to 5.25 inches and finally to 3.5 inches. Thus, these smaller drives introduced size as a new attribute. However, since the new drives provided substantially less capacity than their precursors, established com-puter manufacturers and their disk drive suppliers rejected them first. For example, in case of 3.5-inch drives, personal computer industry was not interested in these new drives, unlike portable computer industry. As the capacity of 3.5-inch drives developed in the portable computer industry, it soon reached the demand of the mainstream market in the personal computer industry, too. As a result, customer value emphasis changed from ca-pacity to size, and 3.5-inch drives disrupted the market for 5.25-inch drives in the personal computer industry.

Bower and Christensen (1995) demonstrate the process of disruption with performance trajectories. Trajectory charts include trajectories illustrating both the performance of-fered by new and established technologies and the performance demanded by customers in the market (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Trajectory chart of a disruptive technology (modified from Keller and Hüsig 2009)

Disruption can also be explained with trajectory charts: new technology disrupts the mar-ket, when the performance trajectory of that technology intersects the trajectory describ-ing the performance demanded by the market. However, it is important to notice that the performance of disruptive technologies often never actually exceeds the performance of old technologies in the dimension initially valued by the mainstream market (Bower and Christensen, 1995). For example, 3.5-inch drives did not exceed the capacity of 5.25-inch drives – they only exceeded the demand for the capacity of the mainstream market. This is also visible in Figure 2. Even if Christensen’s trajectories work well in case of disk drives, Danneels (2004) has criticized the concept. The trajectories suggest that only one or two attributes affect customers’ choices. In many cases, the number of different attrib-utes is much higher. Even if disk drives only had capacity and later size as key attribattrib-utes, there are much more key attributes in a car, for example (Danneels, 2004). This makes the use of trajectories with more complex products and technologies difficult.

As previous examples show, Bower and Christensen’s (1995) definition of disruptive technologies relies on supply perspective: oversupply in old attributes shifts the compe-tition to new ones. Adner (2002) however highlights the demand-based view. He suggests that disruption occurs, because the new technology eventually better meets the demand of the mainstream market. Danneels (2004) argues that based on these definitions it is still hard to say, when a technology becomes disruptive, if it is inherently disruptive or if disruptiveness is related to the perspectives of different firms in the market. That is why Adner (2002) suggests the following definition: “A disruptive technology is a technology that changes the bases of competition by changing the performance metrics, along which firms compete.”

As the popularity of disruptive technologies grew, the term was widened to innovations.

In addition to disruptive technological innovations (or disruptive technologies), disrup-tive innovations include disrupdisrup-tive business model innovations (BMI) and disrupdisrup-tive or radical product innovations (RPI) (Markides, 2006). These types have been identified because they “-- arise in different ways, have different competitive effects and require different response strategies from incumbents” (Markides, 2006). Disruptive business model or strategic innovations introduce a significantly different business model com-pared to existing ones in the market. Thus, this type of disruptive innovations does not discover new products or services; it only redefines what the product is and how it is delivered to the market (Markides, 2006). Radical product innovations or new-to-the-world products represent often something completely new, which has not existed in the market before. That is why they are rarely driven by demand (Markides, 2006): customers could not had demanded something they did not know would even exist. Figure 3 illus-trates the different types of disruptive innovations.

Figure 3. Different types of disruptive innovations

Low-cost airline companies (e.g. EasyJet, Ryanair) represent an example of disruptive business model innovations (Markides, 2006). Even if disruptive technologies often re-place incumbents with entrants (Danneels, 2004), new business model innovations only capture a certain market share but never fully displace the old models (Markides, 2006).

For example, British Airways is still competing in the market, even if EasyJet has taken some of its customers. In turn, innovations, such as car, TV, PC and mobile phone, rep-resent radical product innovations (Markides, 2006). From now on, the term disruptive innovation is used in this study, if the use of disruptive technology is not exclusively needed.

An opposite for disruptive innovations are sustaining innovations, which improve the ex-isting products, technologies or business models in the mainstream market (Kostoff et al., 2004). Thus, sustaining technological innovations strengthen established performance trajectories. However, sustaining innovations (e.g. fuel injection of cars) have also driven companies out of business, so a firm’s failure alone does not tell whether the change in the market was disruptive or not (Schmidt and Druehl, 2008).

It is important to notice that both disruptive and sustaining innovations can be either rad-ical or incremental in nature (Kostoff et al., 2004; Govindarajan and Kopalle, 2006b).

However, being radical does not imply that the innovation is necessarily disruptive. Rad-icalness measures the extent an innovation is based on a considerably new technology in relation to existing ones (Chandy and Tellis, 1998; Colarelli O’Connor, 1998). Radical innovations can target either existing or niche markets, they perform well in existing at-tributes and incumbents usually survive them better than disruptive innovations (Govindarajan and Kopalle, 2006b; Govindarajan et al., 2011). Thus, radicalness is a technology-based dimension, whereas disruptiveness is based on market factors. Cell phones represent radical and disk drives less radical disruptive innovations: they both disrupted their markets by introducing new performance attributes (portability and smaller size), but only cell phones were based on a new technology (Govindarajan and Kopalle, 2006b). On the other hand, digital versatile disks (DVD) represent a radical but sustaining innovation, because despite of the new technology, the innovation still targeted

the same market as video home system (VHS), i.e. an existing market (Govindarajan and Kopalle, 2006b).

Innovations can either enhance a firm’s competence or destroy it (Bergek et al., 2013).

Again, this implies nothing about the disruptive nature of the innovation – even if incum-bents tend to introduce competence enhancing and entrants competence destroying inno-vations (Gilbert, 2012). Competence enhancing innoinno-vations are based on existing com-petencies, knowledge and skills, whereas competence destroying innovations build on new competences, knowledge and skills (Tushman and Anderson, 1986). Therefore, com-petence destroying innovations make existing knowledge and skills obsolete (Anderson and Tushman, 1990), which often favors entrants (Tushman and Anderson, 1986). How-ever, if competence destroying innovations still target the existing customers and their needs, incumbents have better chances to survive than in case of disruptive innovations (Danneels, 2004).

Characteristics

In the literature, certain characteristics are usually linked to disruptive technologies and innovations. They can be smaller, lighter and more flexible, reliable and convenient than existing technologies (Kostoff et al., 2004). Disruptive innovations and technologies are often described as simple, too (Walsh et al., 2002; Kostoff et al., 2004; Schmidt and Druehl, 2008). This refers especially to the technological characteristics, which might not be so radically different or difficult (Bower and Christensen, 1995). As remarked by Walsh and Linton, disruptive technologies can indeed be a combination of existing tech-nologies, too (Kostoff et al., 2004). Despite of being technologically simpler, Kostoff et al. (2004) argue that disruptive technologies can still be more efficient, for example, in terms of higher unit performance (e.g. higher computing power).

One widely discussed characteristics of disruptive innovations and technologies is price.

Many scholars have claimed that disruptive innovations and technologies are cheaper than established ones (Adner, 2002; Walsh et al., 2002; Kostoff et al., 2004). Indeed, this is true many situations: smaller disk drives (disruptive technology) were less expensive than their earlier versions and low-cost airline companies (disruptive business model in-novation) offer cheaper flights than traditional airlines do (Bower and Christensen, 1995;

Markides, 2006).

However, disruptive innovations can also be more expensive than established products and services in the market (Govindarajan and Kopalle, 2006b; Schmidt and Druehl, 2008). For example, cell phones were initially offered with a higher price, because they introduced attributes (e.g. portability and convenience), which attracted segments clearly detached from old ones. They were sold to corporate executives and doctors, who differ relatively much from the segments of landlines (homes and offices) (Schmidt and Druehl, 2008; Govindarajan et al., 2011). Schmidt and Druehl (2008) argue that when a disruptive

innovation is adapted by customers whose needs are significantly different from the main-stream market, price can be higher. Price has also emerged discussion when it comes to trajectory charts. In his study, Adner (2002) justified that customers’ willingness to pay for performance beyond their actual demand is decreasing. This means that price becomes more relevant, when performance exceeds the requirements. That is why he suggests that price trajectories should be included to trajectory charts, too.

Another important observation related to disruptive innovations is the effect of different perspectives. Some companies can find some innovations disruptive, while others see them as rather sustaining (Christensen, 2001). Moreover, time matters: initially a disrup-tive innovation may not be very disrupdisrup-tive to incumbents, but later it drives them out of business (Schmidt and Druehl, 2008). It is also important to notice that a disruptive inno-vation has nothing to do with that who introduces it – even if incumbents are often linked to sustaining innovations and entrants to disruptive ones. For example, Apple’s iPod is a sustaining innovation introduced by an entrant, and Intel’s Celeron processor represents a disruptive innovation introduced by an incumbent (Schmidt and Druehl, 2008). Thus, Danneels (2004) criticizes that the typical characteristics should not be an evaluation cri-teria for identifying a disruptive innovation. As discussed in this chapter, disruptive in-novations are not always the same: there are many exceptions linked to them and they can be categorized in different ways. More important than finding an unambiguous defi-nition for disruptive innovations is to understand their value, effects and consequences.