

Disruptive Innovation Doesn’t Always Hurt Market Leaders - dalek2point3
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/why-disruptive-innovation-doesnt-always-hurt-market-leaders/

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anjc
The overloading of the word 'disruption' irks me terribly. It seems like
everybody wants to be 'disruptive', when all they really mean is 'successful'.

Anyway, Christensen defines 'disruptive innovation' fairly rigorously, and it
doesn't seem like their interpretation fits with his. Half the point of
disruptive innovations is that, retrospectively, they were ignored and allowed
to exist by incumbents for whatever reason, eventually toppling them. If
they've been acquired then they're not disruptive anymore, are they?

Would Oculus Rift have been a disruptive innovation if it was left to grow?
Would it have upended value networks? Maybe. Is it a disruptive innovation now
that Facebook has acquired it? Well not according to Christensen's criteria
for 'disruption'. The product could be called a radical innovation, but it's
not disruptive.

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kyllo
Uber is one of the few startups that I would call legitimately disruptive,
because it uses technology to take customers from the legally regulated taxi
industry. Airbnb and Aereo are also what I would consider disruptive. Tesla
Motors perhaps.

I think that whether local governments have passed or tried to pass
legislation banning a given startup is a good litmus test for how "disruptive"
a startup really is. If your startup doesn't have any serious legal challenges
thrown in its path, it's probably not very disruptive. The first thing
incumbent corporations will do when faced with a legitimate threat is use
their political influence to try to make the threatening business model
illegal.

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kyllo
I think startups are turning out to be more like outsourced, free-market R&D
for the bigcorps. They can sit back, wait and see what potentially disruptive
startups are gaining traction in their own market, and then just acqui-hire
them. Disruption isn't a problem when you have the cash to simply _buy_ the
disruptors.

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IBM
This is true for the internet companies. For Apple, the innovation is organic
(much to the chagrin of VCs [0][1]). Google and Facebook are constantly baited
into buying startups because their business fundamentally has a shallower moat
than Apple's. There's no fear factor that VCs can prey on with Apple - there's
not many hardware startups being funded that can ever hope to threaten Apple.
When they do make an acquisition they'll almost certainly never overpay.

[0][https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/464741929356230657](https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/464741929356230657)

[1][https://twitter.com/cdixon/status/427602474086584320](https://twitter.com/cdixon/status/427602474086584320)

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cma
Beats? Might work out for them, but is it as likely to be a good deal as
YouTube or Danger was for Google?

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rgbrenner
Danger? Do you mean:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danger_(company)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danger_\(company\))

Because that's an odd example of a 'good deal'... acquired by Microsoft for
$500m, eventually released Kin. Spent over $1B on Kin, and was a huge failure
for MS.

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nostrademons
I think he meant Android, done by the same founder as Danger, but bought by
Google for $50M in 2005. Android's now potentially a $multi-billion business.

~~~
coldtea
Only Google makes pennies from Android. Samsung makes the $multi-billion.

