Disruptive Technology Reconsidered: A Critique and Research Agenda

The popular work by Clayton Christensen and colleagues on disruptive technology serves as a springboard to examine five key issues concerning the effect of technological change on firms and industries. This article challenges and integrates current theory in this domain, and raises questions to initiate new work. The discussion is organized around the following themes: the definition of disruptive technology, the predictive use of the theory of technological disruption, explaining the success of incumbents, the implications of the theory for the merits of being customer-oriented, and the merits of creating a spin-off to commercialize the disruptive technology. Examination of these themes shows the relationship of the disruptive technology work with research in a variety of related areas. Many of these links have not been made explicit before, and several of them have been misunderstood. This article is intended to encourage further research on disruptive technology and spur debate by practitioners and scholars alike.