disruptive-innovation

Read [runtime](../../content/RUNTIME.md) and [advisory rules](../../content/policies/advisory.md) before applying this skill. Other Foreman layers and the catalog are in `../../content/`, relative to this SKILL.md. # Disruptive Innovation Kodak invented the digital camera in 1975 and buried it, fearful of cannibalising its film business. By 2012, the company had filed for bankruptcy. Blockbuster had the opportunity to acquire Netflix for $50 million in 2000 and declined; by 2010, it was gone. Nokia commanded 49% of the global smartphone market in 2007, the year Apple introduced the iPhone; by 2013, its handset division was sold to Microsoft for a fraction of its former value. These are not cautionary tales about bad management. They are case studies in a structural pattern that Clayton Christensen identified and named in *The Innovator's Dilemma* (1997): disruption does not kill companies because their leaders are incompetent. It kills them because their leaders are doing exactly what good management theory tells them to do -- listening to their best customers, investing in the highest-margin opportunities, and pursuing sustaining innovations that improve existing products along established performance dimensions. The tragedy is that rational, well-managed companies can do everything right and still lose everything. --- ## The Framework ### The Mechanism of Disruption Christensen distinguished between two fundamentally different types of innovation: **Sustaining Innov...