The term disruptive innovation, coined by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, became known after the publication of the book “The Innovator’s Dilemma” in 1997. According to the book in question, disruptive innovation is a concept that describes a technological innovation , product or service, that uses a disruptive strategy to overcome an existing, dominant technology in the market. In other words, the term corresponds to totally innovative products and services, emerging at the base of the market pyramid that, in a short period of time, grow significantly in the value scale and surpass traditionally established competitors.
According to Christensen, to better understand the concept, it is necessary to draw a parallel between two forms of innovation: sustaining and disruptive. Sustaining innovation is when organizations invest in improving products or services to reaffirm their leadership in the market. Disruptive innovation is when an organization presents a simpler, more accessible and cheaper product to consumers, seeking to serve a public that previously had no access to the market.
Basically, disruptive innovation is a strategy of offering consumers a product or service that is more affordable and offers more advantages over the competition. Implementing an innovation of this type usually causes buyers to flock to the company that launched the new product, while competitors lose ground and, over time, may become completely outdated.
To better understand the concept, one can think of innovations canadian cell phone numbers that quickly elevated their creators to market leadership positions. Personal cell phones replaced many landlines; messaging apps like WhatsApp made SMS obsolete; platforms like Netflix overtook video rental services; GPS devices replaced maps; Google transformed phone books and encyclopedias into products of the past, etc.
Disruptive innovation creates new markets, revealing new categories of consumers. This is generally possible thanks to new technologies, but it can also occur through new business models that connect old technologies and use them in innovative ways. Steve Jobs and his entire team at Apple, for example, revolutionized the entire cell phone market with the launch of the first iPhone. The idea was to integrate existing technologies into a single device: a telephone, an iPod, and an internet communicator. This new Apple cell phone had a simple concept, inspired by the company's own products: eliminating the keyboard from cell phones and inserting a high-definition screen that could respond to user commands when touched.
The launch of the first iPhone model is an excellent example of the effects of disruptive innovation. In this case, in addition to transforming Apple's customer base into true fans of the brand, it forced all competitors to launch similar smartphones, that is, with a touch screen. Companies that did not embrace the innovation disappeared considerably from the market, as is the case with Blackberry, which lau