MAN 608 – Technology, Operations & Innovation

Name: Sadia Altaf

ID: 19099
Section: MWE-9938

Reading Journal #3 for Week 8: Understanding Disruptive Innovation

a. Go through the article titled “Disruptive Technologies Catching the Wave” (Christensen
& Bower, 1995). How do the authors differentiate sustainable and disruptive innovation?
Draw the diagram to illustrate the authors’ point of view.

Chart Title

Column1

Sustainable

Sustainable Column1
SUSTAINABLE:
- Maintains a steady rate of product development
- Catering customers demands in the same value which has been created
- Basically, a trend of slow performance improvement

DISRUPTIVE:
- Mainstream customers are not ready to use disruptive products
- At first, used in new markets and by new audience
- Not valued by every customer because it is a different package of product
- It opens up new markets and new attributes in it

b. Summarize the example of the Hard-Disk Drive Industry mentioned in the same article.

The example of hard-disk drive industry has been used in this article. Years which are mentioned
are 1976 till 1992. The performance of disk drive improved a lot in these years. There was a
clear technological change, in a better way to say. There was a whole improvement tenure which
was adopted by all the companies of this industry. Despite of following the technological
improvement trend, no single manufacturing company was able to sustain more than few years
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MAN 608 – Technology, Operations & Innovation

that is why we cannot see any company today from 1976. The prominent reason was that
companies were not able to meet customer’s demands in a longer run. Storage capacities, sizes of
hard drives, all in all there were many major issues for the companies dealing in this. IBM
pioneered 5.25 hard disk drives and became the main leading supplier till mid 1980s. Demand
for hard disk drives was increasing at 30% per year because of all the disruptive innovations
showed by the companies