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In 1997, Clayton Christensen published his classic book, The Innovator's Dilemma, in which he described a new form of competition that he called "disruptive innovation." Like the relentlessly competitive Borg villains of Star Trek fame, disruptive innovators stealthily invaded unattractive market segments, at first seeming to pose no threat to the original industry innovators. But by constantly improving their products the upstart disruptors eventually defeated incumbent titans. By offering a perceptive analysis of the disruptors' strategy and suggesting unconventional defensive maneuvers, Christensen became recognized as one of the world's leading management gurus.
"That book," wrote As Alan Murray noted in 2010 in the Wall Street Journal , "documents how market-leading companies have missed game-changing transformations in industry after industry - computers (mainframes to PCs), telephony (landline to mobile), photography (film to digital), stock markets (floor to online) - not because of 'bad' management, but because they followed the dictates of 'good' management. They listened closely to their customers. They carefully studied market trends. They allocated capital to the innovations that promised the largest returns. And in the process, they missed disruptive innovations that opened up new customers and markets for lower-margin, blockbuster products."[2]
"For a generation of CEOs," writes analyst Vivek Wadhwa in the Washington Post , "Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma was a guiding light on how to survive industry disruptions. His book educated business executives on where competition would emerge from and how to respond to the threats... Christensen's ideas have had a positive impact on industry. Companies such as Proctor and Gamble, GE, and Salesforce credit them with having helped them stay ahead. They provided an excellent way of thinking about innovation."[3]
Yet more recently, observers of the battle between incumbents and challengers have turned the field of disruptive innovation into contested territory. "Of late," writes Wadhwa, "journalists and academics have questioned the accuracy of Christensen's industry analyses and challenged his broad generalizations... they teach companies to look in the wrong places for competitive threats and encourage them to separate the innovative disruptors [in their companies] from the core businesses; to put them in new company divisions."
Christensen chose to play defense: "Unfortunately," he wrote in Harvard Business Review in December 2015, "disruption theory is in danger of becoming...