Joseph Bower And Clayton Christensen: Article Analysis

In this article written by Joseph Bower and Clayton Christensen discuss disruptive technologies and why large corporations lose to smaller emerging companies and their technologies. Additionally, they examine the risk of solely listening to their customers or consumers, and finally how to spot a disruptive technology versus sustaining technology. In the article Bower & Christensen use many examples from different industries to explain disruptive technologies. The one most prominently discussed is the hard disk drive, so I will be using that mostly for my examples illustrated in this review. I believe the reason they use the hard disk industry almost exclusively in their research is because it is a tenured industry that is very fast paced and

Sustaining technology “is that which extends existing technologies, improving them incrementally” and disruptive technology “represents entirely new technology solutions that bring a new twist to an existing market — typically at a far lower price point” (Golden, 2011). The writers believed that a disruptive technology can be detected and sought after using a few key checkpoints. First, is to determine whether the technology is sustaining or disruptive. Most companies have processes for tracking sustaining technology as they service their current customers and consumers but very few companies have processes surrounding the unearthing and identification of disruptive technologies. The writers say in order to do this you can examine internal arguments. If marketing and financial execs are turning down technology but tech personnel is stating that a new market for the tech will emerge can signal a disruptive technology that needs to be investigated by upper management. A disruptive technology may only stake claim to a very small portion of a market today and the managerial and financial incentives don’t make sense to certain executives does not mean that that technology does not own a brand new market that will outpace the market of that current company’s main customers in the months or years to come. The review of these types of technologies can be the make or break of your company in the future. The authors directly state that “those companies that finally did launch new models typically lagged behind entrant companies by two years—eons in an industry whose products’ life cycles are often two years” (Bower, 1995). Second, asking the right people the right questions about a new technology’s strategic importance is key. Asking current customer about a new disruptive technology is an inaccurate process to undertake because, though, they are accurate when