Disruptive Technology

Wikipedia, the free, on-line encyclopedia, says a disruptive technology is

A disruptive technology or disruptive innovation is a technological innovation that improves a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically by being lower priced or designed for a different set of consumers. A disruptive innovation ignores the currently popular definition of what counts as quality and creates a new definition.

Disruptive innovations can be broadly classified into low-end and new-market disruptive innovations. A new-market disruptive innovation is often aimed at non-consumption (i.e., consumers who would not have used the products already on the market), whereas a lower-end disruptive innovation is aimed at mainstream customers for whom price is more important than quality.

Disruptive technologies are particularly threatening to the leaders of an existing market, because they are competition coming from an unexpected direction. A disruptive technology can come to dominate an existing market by either filling a role in a new market that the older technology could not fill (as cheaper, lower capacity but smaller-sized flash memory is doing for personal data storage in the 2000s) or by successively moving up-market through performance improvements until finally displacing the market incumbents (as digital photography has largely replaced film photography).

In contrast to "disruptive technology", a "revolutionary technology" introduces products with highly improved new features into the market, such as the automobile or telephone. A "sustaining technology or innovation" improves product performance of established products. Sustaining technologies are incremental.

The literature tells us that innovations that are successful generally don't require users to completely change what they're doing. The best ones are those that help people do what they are already doing but more conveniently, easily, or cheaply. for example, accounting software allowed millions of tax payers who already did their own taxes to do them better and more quickly. That doesn't mean there can't be some learning to do.

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