5 Years of Must Reads from HBR: 2019 Edition

What Is Disruptive Innovation?

by Clayton M. Christensen, Michael Raynor, and Rory McDonald

THE THEORY OF DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION, introduced in these pages in 1995, has proved to be a powerful way of thinking about innovation-driven growth. Many leaders of small, entrepreneurial companies praise it as their guiding star; so do many executives at large, well-established organizations, including Intel, Southern New Hampshire University, and Salesforce.com.

Unfortunately, disruption theory is in danger of becoming a victim of its own success. Despite broad dissemination, the theory’s core concepts have been widely misunderstood and its basic tenets frequently misapplied. Furthermore, essential refinements in the theory over the past 20 years appear ...