‘The innovator’s dilemma’, is one of my “bible”, a must-read for entrepreneurs and innovators

I’d like to thank you for your article, because I think that it’s very close to what Clayton Christensen wanted people to understand when reading his book.

I’d like to add that most of the disruptive innovation aren’t technically advanced. Indeed, very often they are advanced (innovative) in term of ‘usage’, but not in term of ‘performance’ valued by the existing market’s customer. This is why the existing customer usually aren’t interested by such an innovation…Their performance needs aren’t met…. until some time in the future, when the innovation, in addition of fulfilling the needs of the users of the new market, is also fulfilling the performance needs of the market….. that is going to be disrupted.

One of the most interesting disruptive innovation that I know of is Microsoft Office : when Microsoft introduced Office in the 90′s, Lotus 123 was the best spreadsheet and fulfilled all the functionnal needs of the accountants. Wordperfect was the best text processing tool ,and me the needs of the secretaries and admin… At this time, Excel was an “awful” product for accountants as well as Word was for documents typing.
Microsoft targeted the managers who had to do composite documents (using Word), including numerical data or graphs, and willing to present this information with an overhead (ppt).

At some point in the future, Excel was good enough as well as Word…and today….nobody knows anymore about Wordperfect and 123… Their market had been disrupted.

Regards

I was reading this on Hutch Carpenter’s blog:

The main reason “disruptive” causes confusion is that it sounds like “major upset,” which suggests that the technological cause should be major as well. This leads us to falsely conflate disruptive …

P.S. to Arthur: There’s an in-depth discussion of disruption in a business school context in Christensen’s “Seeing What’s Next”.