Defining and identifying disruptive innovations

Three essential questions about innovations prevent academics from helping managers determine if a new technology is a disruptive innovation to their organization. First, what is a disruptive innovation? Second, how can a disruptive innovation be disruptive to some and yet sustaining to others? Third, how can disruptive innovations be identified before a disruption has occurred in an organization? This paper proposes answers to these three questions by redefining disruptive innovations through use of innovation adoption characteristics. Through the relative nature of innovation characteristics, a heuristic, or Baedeker, to better determine if an innovation could be disruptive to an organization is proposed. Illustration of the approach is presented to show how potentially disruptive innovations could be identified before an organizational disruption has occurred.