Disruptive Technology or Visionary Leadership?

C hristensen’s (1997) thesis of disruptive technology has been highly praised and popular with managers. Two of its premises are important and insightful. These deal with the performance path of a disruptive technology and its impact on dominant incumbents who ignore it in favor of listening to their current consumers. However, Christensen’s thesis also suffers from limitations, two of which are troubling: ambiguity in the definition of disruptive technology and the logic of the sampling to test its validity. Several studies my colleagues and I have conducted over the years suggest that the disruption of incumbents—if and when it occurs—is due not to technological innovation per se but rather to incumbents’ lack of vision of the mass market and an unwillingness to cannibalize assets to serve that market. We have developed metrics to test these concepts. Models to predict the outcomes and financial value of strategic changes that firms can make to avoid these problems. With his concept of disruptive technology, Christensen (1997) made a highly praised and critical contribution to the strategy literature. The impact of his thesis has been enormous both in the business and academic communities. For example, a search of the term disruptive innovation yields over 150,000 thousand entries on Google, much higher than for rival terms such as radical innovation (58,000) or architectural innovation (16,000) or competence-destroying innovation (55). Danneels (2004) reported that Christensen’s book has sold over 200,000 copies. These are impressive statistics for any theory or concept in strategy. Thus, it is with some hesitation that I attempt to comment on this thesis or to suggest an alternative. This article summarize Christensen’s (1997) thesis in five important premises, many of which can be further divided into subpremises, shown as letters in the following points: