Disruptive Innovation: What Is to Come

Disruptive Innovation: What is to come

Over the years, the term disruptive innovation has been thrown around a lot in the business world thanks to Clayton Christensen, but the true meaning has been slightly diluted due to the over and improper use of the terminology to real life situations.  The world is ever changing and innovations will never stop, it is now part of our human nature to improve and move forward, bridging our current selves with that of ourselves in the future.  This paper will walk the reader through perceptions of disruptive innovation, miss-conceptions related to it, the possibility of negative effects because of innovations that are disruptive and real life examples of how innovations can be disruptive and the effects on society.

To understand what a disruptive innovation is we first should define what exactly is an innovation?  Looking at the example of fire in the book written by Alexander Manu, can aid in distinguishing what makes an innovation and what has the possibility of becoming an innovation.  Fire is one of the first components that helped the human race transcend from the animal kingdom into a world of cognitive thinking, problem solving and critical thinking (Manu 2010).  Fire was around a long time before pre-homo sapiens found a way to harness its power as a tool for future human development, but the existence of fire does not necessarily make it an innovation. Fire only became an innovation, when humans found out how to beneficially use it to help make every day actives easier and were able to preserve and imitate it on demand.  In other words, an innovation is only an innovation when we find a way to use the new technology as a tool to aid in our everyday life and to use the innovation to bridge to a use in the future everyday life (Manu 2010).

We now understand that an innovation can only become an innovation after its use is realized and used by humanity, but when and how does this innovation become disruptive?  Going back to the fire example, was fire a disruptive innovation at the moment of the discovery of its use became realized?  They short answer is no, an innovation cannot be disruptive solely because it has the potential to do so, it only becomes disruptive at the moment human motivation embraces this “new” as technology and allows it to expand and improve everyday life (Gobble 2016, Manu 2010).  The disruption in innovation is the part helps us create that bridge to our better self, but is only temporary and can only be temporary because it is being used to take us to an undefined future location in time, which is a circular process that will keep repeating itself.  

The level of disruptiveness is not always realized at the moment of discovery, but is realized when we identify a wide spread use for the innovation (Gobble 2016).  Going back to the fire example, fire became an innovation when we first established the uses for it to help our everyday life such as the use for light, heat and energy.  It then became a disruptive innovation when humanity created ways to preserve and re-create at a future point in time and was widely accepted by everyone as a fundamental tool created by humans.  We have arrived at a principal conclusion for innovation, innovation is a not a process as many managers define it, but an outcome of a process (Manu 2010).