Disruptive Intelligence - How to gather Information to deal with disruptive innovations

Disruptive innovations are innovations that have the capacity to transform a whole business into one with products that are more accessible and affordable (cf. Christensen et al. 2009). As Christensen et al. argue no business is immune to such disruptive innovations. If these authors are right, it might be relevant to be able to recognize these innovations before they disrupt a business. Incumbents may use this information to protect their business and others may use it to participate in the disruption. Either way, gathering information about potential disruptive innovations is a relevant activity. The production of this information (we call this information “disruptive Intelligence”) is the topic of this paper. In particular, we analyze disruptive innovation theory and formulate several intelligence topics which may help in predicting disruptive innovations. In addition, we formulate several ‘biases’ which may impair the production of ‘disruptive intelligence’.