Changing the Innovation Landscape

Disruptive Innovation has been misconstrued to mean several things by different audience, which could lead to the danger of a dilution of its theoretical relevance. This paper makes a conceptual clarification that is essential in construing an innovation as disruptive. The thesis of this study is that adoption is a central attribute required for any innovation to be considered disruptive. Drawing on the relative nature of disruptive innovation, an innovation can only be labelled disruptive when another entity can be said to be disrupted. One mechanism through which this occurs is the increase of adoption of an innovation vis-à-vis the loss of adoption of another. Building on this principle, an innovation labelled as disruptive by design can only potentially reach that status by being adopted. However, this is not enough as the relativity of disruptive innovation requires that another innovation/offering needs to have also lost its adoption significantly