Distripute Innovation

A dispelive innovation is an innovation that helps create a new market and value network, and eventually goes on to disrupt an existing market and value network (over a few years or decades), displacing an earlier technology. The term is used in business and technology belles-lettres to describe innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does non expect, typically first by designing for a different set of consumers in the new market and later by lowering prices in the existing market.In contrast to riotous innovation, a sustaining innovation does not create new markets or value networks but instead only evolves existing ones with better value, alloting the firms within to compete against each others sustaining improvements. Sustaining innovations may be each discontinuous1 (i. e. transformational or revolutionary) or continuous (i. e. evolutionary). The term roiled technology has been widely used as a synonym of disruptive innovation, but the latter is now preferred, because market disruption has been found to be a function usually not of technology itself but rather of its changing application.Sustaining innovations are typically innovations in technology, whereas disruptive innovations change entire markets. For example, the automobile was a revolutionary technological innovation, but it was not a disruptive innovation, because early automobiles were expensive luxury items that did not disrupt the market for horse-drawn vehicles. The market for transportation essentially remained intact until the debut of the lower priced Ford homunculus T in 1908. 2 The mass-produced automobile was a disruptive innovation, because it changed the transportation market. The automobile, by itself, was not.The current theoretical understanding of disruptive innovation is different from what baron be expected by default, an idea that Clayton M. Christensen called the technology mudslide hypothesis. This is the simplistic idea that an establish ed firm fails because it doesnt keep up technologically with other firms. In this hypothesis, firms are like climbers scrambling upward on crumbling footing, where it takes constant upward-climbing effort just to stay still, and any break from the effort (such as complacency born of profitability) causes a rapid downhill slide.Christensen and colleagues have shown that this simplistic hypothesis is wrong it doesnt model reality. What they have shown is that good firms are usually aware of the innovations, but their business environs does not allow them to pursue them when they first arise, because they are not profitable enough at first and because their development can take scarce resources forward from that of sustaining innovations (which are needed to compete against current competition). In Christensens terms, a firms existing value networks place insufficient value on the disruptive innovation to allow its pursuit by that firm.Meanwhile, start-up firms inhabit different valu e networks, at least until the day that their disruptive innovation is able to invade the older value network. At that time, the established firm in that network can at best only fend off the market share attack with a me-too entry, for which survival (not thriving) is the only reward. 3 The work of Christensen and others during the 2000s has addressed the question of what firms can do to avoid oblivion brought on by technological disruption.