There is a wide number of studies critical of disruption theory. Criticism of Christensen’s theory can be roughly classified into two groups: criticism to the descriptive aspect of the theory, and criticism to the normative aspect of the theory. This distinction is not clear cut and often there are overlaps, but it is a useful way of framing criticism to not just disrup-tion theory, but any kind of social science theory.
In regard to the normative aspect, many critics concede that disruption is a real phe-nomenon and useful concept, however they disagree on Christensen’s advice to firms, especially the idea that creating an autonomous organization is the best way to avoid dis-ruption (Danneels, 2004; Thompson, 2014b; Lepore, 2014; Tellis, 2013a; Gans, 2014;
Gassée, 2014b; King and Baatartogtokh, 2015; Sampere, Bienenstock, and Zuckerman, 2016). Christensen’s advice for a ‘middle way’ in between corporate spin-offs and inter-nal product development has gained him criticism in two fronts. Some researchers rec-ommend to pursue more aggressively open innovation outside the company’s boundaries (Chesbrough, 2003a, 2003b, 2006), while others recommend to integrate ‘unrelenting
in-novation’ inside the company’s boundaries (Tellis, 2006, 2013a; Gans, 2014). According to Tellis, the best way to avoid disruption is to have a culture of innovation:
“Contrary to Christensen’s theory, disruption is not the prerogative of new en-trants. We find that some incumbents are disrupted by new entrants, while other incumbents themselves introduce disruptive technologies. In other words, some incumbents are innovative and others are not. What is the reason for this differ-ence? The thesis of this book is that the internal culture of the firm determines whether it will be innovative or not, not its status as an incumbent or the arrival of some external technology. Firms that have an innovative culture are able to devel-op, embrace, and deploy disruptive innovations. Firms that do not have such a cul-ture cling to their old technologies and are disrupted.”
—Tellis, 2013a.
On the other hand, several researches have identified that among the companies who have avoided disruption there seem to be many more cases of mergers and acquisitions, rather than cases of spin-offs of independent business units. This solution is more in line with Chesbrough’s advice based on open innovation, than Christensen’s advice. Among these examples, King and Baatartogtokh highlight the cases of Disney and pharmaceutical companies, according to them:
“The prospect of an entrepreneur with new technology potentially disrupting in-cumbent businesses can make managers wary of cooperating with entrants. In several of the cases we explored, however, incumbents recognized the potential for working with new entrants. The Walt Disney Co., for example, responded to the emergence of computer animation by cooperating with and eventually acquir-ing Pixar Animation Studios. Disney could have continued to compete with Pixar and tried to drive it from the market, but Disney managers wisely recognized that their company’s strengths were in marketing, distribution, and creating positive experiences at parks, cruise ships, and resorts; Pixar, by contrast, was a content
including cooperation, when facing competition from biotech startups. Rather than seeing every biotech company as a potential disrupter, pharmaceutical company executives often cooperate with biotech startups to leverage their own strengths.”
—King and Baatartogtokh, 2015.
In a similar way, Thompson (2014d) calls attention to the case of Facebook’s billionaire acquisitions of Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. Ironically, WhatsApp founders at one point applied for jobs at Facebook but were rejected before founding their compa-ny. However, Thompson argues that despite the high price paid for WhatsApp and Insta-gram, Facebook was able to not only avoid disruption, but also to cement its dominance in social media.
However, it is not clear when researchers point out to these examples if merge and acqui-sitions can really avoid the disruption of a market, or instead only avoid the disruption of a handful of incumbents with sufficient cash reserves, while the rest of them are still dis-rupted. Telecommunications companies have seen their SMS platform been disrupted by instant messaging applications, regardless of which technology company owns them; and many image-sharing websites like Flickr and Myspace are still being disrupted by Insta-gram.
Dediu (2013f) has also identified in Apple’s acquisition of NeXT in 1996 what is an ad-mittedly exceptional case of avoiding disruption. By applying Christensen’s concept of organization’s capabilities and adding to them the notion of ‘priorities’, Dediu ponders if Apple’s acquisition of NeXT should be considered instead a reverse acquisition:
“A company is defined as the sum of three values: resources, processes and priori-ties (RPP). Everything of value can be classified into these three categories…
The trickiest thing to perceive though is the value of a set of Priorities. Priorities are the answers to the “Why” question as much as Resources are the answers to the “What” and processes are to the “How”…
Acquiring Priorities is also fundamental in that they are usually exclusive. A com-pany typically only has room for one set. If there are conflicting priorities, they need to be sorted out else the company can end up in a state of internal conflict and dysfunction. So, if you’re acquiring a set of Priorities, it’s likely that you’ll have to discard your own. It makes most sense when a company which might oth-erwise be prosperous needs to change direction.
So, in a way, an acquisition of Priorities is almost a reverse acquisition. The ac-quired is actually ‘buying’ the acquirer. The acac-quired company’s Priorities (and hence Processes and Resources) become the guiding principles in the acquirer. It’s what happened when Apple bought NeXT and may have happened when Disney bought Pixar.”
—Dediu, 2013f.
Reverse acquisitions might be exceptional, yet their impact can be great as was the case of Apple, making it impossible to ignore them. Furthermore, Christensen’s solution to the innovator’s dilemma based on the creation of autonomous organizations is also admitted-ly an exceptional outcome according to his own account, rather than the norm. Onadmitted-ly in recent years has Christensen expressed that his advice to companies might not always be the best solution:
“Our current belief is that companies should create a separate division that oper-ates under the protection of senior leadership to explore and exploit a new disrup-tive model. Sometimes this works—and sometimes it doesn’t. In certain cases, a failed response to a disruptive threat cannot be attributed to a lack of understand-ing, insufficient executive attention, or inadequate financial investment. The chal-lenges that arise from being an incumbent and an entrant simultaneously have yet to be fully specified; how best to meet those challenges is still to be discovered.”
—Christensen, Raynor, and McDonald, 2015.
Some researchers have found that incumbent firms are as equally or more likely to intro-duce disruptive technologies than entrant firms, just the opposite of Christensen’s hypoth-esis (Sood and Tellis, 2011; Tellis, 2013a). However, they point out that entrants also suc-ceed in introducing disruptive technologies, which is noteworthy considering their weaker position. According to Sood and Tellis, “in all markets, even though incumbents intro-duced more technologies and caused more disruption than entrants, many incumbents lost market dominance and subsequently failed. Hence, there is no room for complacency. En-trants do disrupt, and for enEn-trants to account for many disruptions, often without the ex-pertise, market knowledge, or resources of the incumbents, is quite impressive” (2011).
Other researchers have found that the strategy of moving upwards to the more profitable high-end of the market can be sustainable in the long term, the opposite of Christensen’s advice (Thompson, 2013a; King and Baatartogtokh, 2015; Schmidt and van der Rhee, 2013; Gans, 2016). In some cases, companies do not only move upwards to the more profitable end and avoid disruption, but actually enter other markets from the high-end and cause the disruption of competitors located in the middle- and low-high-end. The later corresponds to the elusive idea of ‘high-end disruption’, a type of disruptive innovation that is highly attractive to business because of its promise of higher profit margins, and to researchers because of its implications for disruption theory.
Nowadays, instead of the term high-end disruption, the term ‘encroachment’ is preferred for this phenomenon. Encroachment can take place from the low-end as Christensen’s theory predicts, but also from the high-end, which represents an addition to disruption theory. Whether this addition constitutes a contradiction to Christensen’s theory, or an ex-tension to it, depends on how strictly the definition of disruptive innovation is interpreted (Sampere, Bienenstock, and Zuckerman, 2016). According to Christensen, “some have suggested that these are instances of high-end disruption. I resist labeling these phenom-ena as disruptions, because I am trying to give specific meaning to the term, independent of the outcome” (2006). In this regard, this research disagrees with Christensen, trying to define disruption as a concept independent of the outcome is a valid criticism to the
theo-ry. Whether high-end disruption is a real phenomenon or not depends on empirical evi-dence, not on a priori definitions.
While Christensen remains adamant that high-end disruption is possible, researches like Schmidt and Druehl (2008), and Schmidt and van der Rhee (2013) have explored the conditions for market encroachment from the high end. They insist that high-end disrup-tion is not a special case of disrupdisrup-tion, instead the concept of encroachment allows for a wider generalization of both low-end and high-end disruption:
“Consider the Nintendo Wii and the Tesla Roadster. One is a video game console that was introduced at $250. The other is an electric car introduced at $109,000.
Each illustrates a different approach to positioning a new product.
The Wii attracted a new type of customer to the video game market; Nintendo de-cided not to compete head-on with Microsoft’s high-performance Xbox 360 and Sony’s high-performance PlayStation 3. Both of these competitors had much faster processing power and high-end graphics, traditionally the “core attributes”
of product performance in the video game industry. Instead of competing on those core attributes, where the Wii offered less functionality, the Wii instead included a somewhat novel ‘new attribute’ — its easy-to-use motion-sensitive controller, dubbed the ‘Wii-mote.’
Like the Wii, the Tesla Roadster offered a novel attribute — in this case, electric propulsion. But unlike the Wii, the Roadster did not make sacrifices to the ‘core attributes’ of product performance in its industry. Instead, the Roadster closely matched the acceleration and ride of high-performance cars such as the Porsche 911.
Hardcore gamers never viewed the Wii as a replacement for the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, and the Wii was never marketed that way. By contrast,
perfor-head-to-head against other high-performance vehicles, as something drivers could buy if they wanted the ‘new attribute’ — electric propulsion — without sacrificing performance.
Both the Wii and Tesla progressively attacked an existing market (we say they
‘encroached on’ the market), but the Wii was priced at the lower end of its market and thus encroached from the low end upward, while the Tesla Roadster en-croached from the high end downward.”
—Schmidt and van der Rhee, 2013.
Following this same thinking, Gans points out that “Apple did not proceed as a standard disruptor. Instead, the iPhone was priced at the high end of the market, with a higher price than almost all of its competitors” (2016). Likewise, according to Evans, “in mo-bile, disruption comes from above”, and elaborates, “in momo-bile, the good expensive prod-uct has generally got cheaper faster than the cheap, weak prodprod-uct got good” (2015a).
This shows that high-end disruption is a concept of interest for the pluralistic interpreta-tion of disruptive innovainterpreta-tion.
Finally, the last source of criticism to the normative aspect of Christensen’s theory origi-nates from the theory’s defeatism. This is found in the idea that incumbents are bound to be disrupted and that there is almost nothing they can do to prevent it. The solution to the innovator’s dilemma in The Innovator’s Solution (2003) is a broken promise, by Chris-tensen’s own account, avoiding the innovator’s dilemma and disruption is extraordinary.
This is an area in which almost unanimously all researchers have expressed dissent with Christensen, varying only in the tone of their criticism (Lepore, 2014; Tellis, 2013a, 2013b; Dediu, 2012c; Thompson, 2013a; Gassée, 2014b; Gans, 2016).
At the strongest end of the spectrum, Lepore argues that “every age has a theory of rising and falling, of growth and decay, of bloom and wilt: a theory of nature”, and concludes that “our era has disruption, which, despite its futurism, is atavistic. It’s a theory of
histo-ry founded on a profound anxiety about financial collapse, an apocalyptic fear of global devastation, and shaky evidence” (2014).
While Lepore also criticizes the descriptive aspect of Christensen’s theory, most of her criticism steams from the normative aspect of the theory, especially when it is suggested that disruptive innovation be applied to the news industry and the public sector. Lepore calls attention to the fact that disruption theory does not seem to be only an objective de-scription of the world, but often tries to act as a force shaping policy making. Lepore says, “much more disruption, we are told, lies ahead. Christensen has co-written books urging disruptive innovation in higher education (‘The Innovative University’), public schools (‘Disrupting Class’), and health care (‘The Innovator’s Prescription’). His acolytes and imitators, including no small number of hucksters, have called for the dis-ruption of more or less everything else” (2014).
Regardless of the social implications of pursuing disruptive innovation in the public sec-tor brought up by Lepore, from a purely academic point of view it must be acknowledged that to this day the application of disruption theory to the study of the public sector has not been particularly fruitful. The study of the public sector has been based almost exclu-sively on normative case studies that explore what would be needed in order to cause dis-ruption, not factual or descriptive case studies of past disruptions (Christensen and Horn, 2008; Christensen, Grossman, and Hwang, 2008; Christensen and Eyring, 2011). In other words, a lot of effort has been dedicated to the study of why disruption has not taken place in the public sector, instead of better understanding the actual cases of disruption in the private sector. Although the absence of disruption is a valid research question (Chris-tensen, 2016b), arguably this line of research has detracted from the potential improve-ments that disruption theory could have made during this time had the same effort been dedicated to the study of actual disruptions in other industries.
Despite its harsh tone, Lepore is not alone in her criticism to disruption theory’s de-featism, found in the idea that incumbents are bound to be disrupted no matter what.
Ac-2014), incumbents are not doomed to be disrupted no matter what. According to Gans, companies try to insure against disruption:
“A final factor that might explain why potentially disruptive events do not always lead to disruption is the preemptive action that firms sometimes take to insure against the consequences of disruption. For instance, they may invest in indepen-dent divisions to insure against demand-side disruption or in integrated research agendas to insure against supply-side disruption. Each of these involves ongoing costs and constraints that might harm a firm’s competitiveness over time. Howev-er, it is also possible for firms to strengthen their ability to manage disruption as they gain experience in doing so. Over time, they may acquire capabilities for doubling up or acquiring entrants. These capabilities may shape whether or how disruptive events impact those firms…
Ultimately, the message is that successful firms and their investors can calm down. This does not mean they can relax; there is always much to be done. But academic research and market experience demonstrate that the fear of inevitable and imminent disruption is unfounded.”
—Gans, 2016.
Christensen himself addressed some of this criticism in the paper The Ongoing Process of Building a Theory of Disruption (2006). There, he clarified the distinction between the descriptive and normative aspects of his theory, emphasized the importance of anomalies, and reiterated that disruption theory is a theory in constant development.
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Figure 5. Descriptive theory and normative theory.
Source: Christensen, 2006.
According to Christensen, “theory is built in two major stages: the descriptive stage and the normative stage. Within each of these stages, theory builders proceed through three steps” (2006). As seen in Figure 5, Christensen identifies a descriptive theory and a nor-mative theory as essentially two different kinds of stages or phases of a theory, not differ-ent aspects of the same theory — as have been discussed so far in this section —. Chris-tensen elaborates on how a theory transitions between these two stages:
“The confusion of competing categorization schemes that often accompanies de-scriptive theory is resolved when researchers, through careful observation, move beyond statements of correlation to define what causes the outcome of interest. As depicted in Figure 5, they leap across to the top of the pyramid of normative theo-ry, whose capstone is a statement of what causes the outcome of interest, not just what is correlated with it. Their understanding of causality enables researchers to assert what actions managers ought to take to get the results they need. For rea-sons noted following, normative theory has much greater predictive power than descriptive theory does. As preliminary versions of this article have been
present-whether we can ever discover what it is. We concluded from these discussions that we cannot judge the value of a theory by whether it is true. The best we can hope for is a body of understanding that asymptotically approaches truth. Hence, the value of a theory is assessed by its predictive power, which is why this article as-serts that normative theory is more advanced, and more useful, than descriptive theory.”
—Christensen, 2006.
Christensen argues that disruption theory has already reached the normative stage, ac-cording to him “disruption theory began the transition from descriptive to normative the-ory in my own mind in about 1996.” Christensen argues that disruption thethe-ory had mostly but not completely finished the transition to a normative theory by the publication of The Innovator’s Dilemma (1997), and that it definitely had finished the transition by the pub-lication of The Innovator’s Solution (2003). In this regard, this research disagrees with Christensen, and it must be emphasized that this idea is deeply problematic. Although the philosophical notion of “asymptotically approaching truth” seems humble at first, it dis-tracts from Christensen’s reiterated assertions that descriptive hurdles are somehow a stage that disruption theory has already cleared out. This stands in stark contrast with the way Christensen had previously acknowledged the importance of clearing descriptive problems in a model before trying to apply it to different cases:
“The reason for painting such a complete picture of a single industry [the disk drive industry] is to establish the internal validity of the failure framework. If a framework or model cannot reliably explain what happened within a single indus-try, it cannot be applied to other situations with confidence.”
—Christensen, 1997.
Christensen seems to have forgotten his own advice and disregards the ample debate that still exists today, even in the best studied case studies of disruptive innovation like the disk drive industry (Nishimura, 2014; Lepore, 2014). Following Christensen’s own words, if disruption theory cannot reliably explain what happened within a single
indus-try, it cannot be applied to other industries with confidence. This, far from being a criti-cism aimed exclusively at disruption theory, is merely a recognition that applies to any social science theory. Theories are at their core descriptive tools, and it is only because of their ability to describe the world that they are also employed normatively, if a theory fails to describe the world it loses its predictive and normative power.
There has been ample criticism to the descriptive aspect of Christensen’s disruption theo-ry. Some of the criticism to Christensen’s theory could be incorporated as improvements to the theory (Danneels, 2004; Markides, 2006; Schmidt and Druehl, 2008; Yu and Hang, 2010; Schmidt and van der Rhee, 2013; Downes and Nunes, 2013; Sinofsky, 2013;
Dediu, 2014b; Thompson, 2013a, 2013b, 2014b; Gans, 2016). However, there is also deeper criticism that would require the reformulation of key concepts of disruption’s the-ory (Yamaguchi, 2006; Sood and Tellis, 2011; Gassée, 2014b; King and Baatartogtokh, 2015; Sampere, Bienenstock, and Zuckerman, 2016).
Inclusion under any of these two groups is only meant to be indicative, not a strict catego-rization. Any kind of criticism to Christensen’s theory that could be incorporated as im-provements to the theory would depend greatly on the willingness of the research com-munity to adopt new concepts and terminology.
While remaining optimistic about disruption theory, Zuckerman has rightly identified the main problem that makes it so difficult to improve the theory today. According to Zuck-erman, it is not clear what is essential, and what is secondary in Christensen’s framework:
“No theory or framework is perfect. And one common imperfection, which is present in Clayton M. Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation as well as many other frameworks, is that it is not entirely clear what is the core idea and what is peripheral. This ambiguity has in turn made it unclear how valuable the theory is and what adjustments might make it more valuable.”
—Sampere, Bienenstock, and Zuckerman, 2016.