Disruptive technology is an innovation process that helps involves creating a new market and value network that eventually goes on to disrupt an existing market and value network (over a few years or decades), displacing an earlier technology. It can be referred to as a new business model with people aiming to create products that possess the characteristic of disruptive technologies as this is the fastest way to create an impact in today’s fast paced consumer markets. However disruptive technology often leads to an existing market segment dying off but there has also been cases where the pioneers of the disruptive technology face the issue that the market wasn’t ready yet to accept the disruptive technology leading to the failure of adoption of the new technology.

The concept of disruptive technology was first introduced by Clayton M. Christensen in “The Innovator’s Dilemma” way back in 1995. Later Christensen replaced the term disruptive technology with disruptive innovation because he recognized that few technologies are intrinsically disruptive or sustaining in character; rather, it is the business model that the technology enables that creates the disruptive impact. However, Christensen’s evolution from a technological focus to a business modeling focus is central to understanding the evolution of business at the market or industry level. In keeping with the insight that what matters economically is the business model, not the technological sophistication itself, Christensen’s theory explains why many disruptive innovations are not “advanced technologies” rather, they are often novel combinations of existing off-the-shelf components, applied cleverly to a small, fledgling value network.

Christensen points out that large corporations are designed to work with sustaining technologies. They excel at knowing their market, staying close to their customers, and having a mechanism in place to develop existing technology. Conversely, they have trouble capitalizing on the potential efficiencies, cost-savings, or new marketing opportunities created by low-margin disruptive technologies. Using real-world examples to illustrate his point, Christensen demonstrates how it is not unusual for a big corporation to dismiss the value of a disruptive technology because it does not reinforce current company goals, only to be blindsided as the technology matures, gains a larger audience and market share and threatens the status quo

One of the largest examples of disruptive technologies would be the internet. It provides multiple platforms for people to communicate, disseminate information, store information, and conduct business on and through the internet. Many traditional services such as cable television and postal services have suffered drastically due to the internet. It has indeed caused the decline and demise of many industries and business but it has also lead to a creation of ample opportunities for people who would have naturally been unable to obtain them. What does this mean for the sums of disruptive technologies? Are they good or bad? Unfortunately there is no simple answer to that question. What remains to be seen is how disruptive technologies will lead to the creation of new products that will help us in moving forward into a sustainable future.