A Harvard Professor Doesn’t Have a Monopoly on ‘Disruption’
Uber has indisputably interrupted the normal activity of the taxi business, and is likely rendering it unable to continue in the normal way. According to standard English usage, then, it is disrupting the taxi business. Christensen, Raynor and McDonald, though, have other ideas:
According to the theory, the answer is no. Uber’s financial and strategic achievements do not qualify the company as genuinely disruptive — although the company is almost always described that way.
By their taxonomy, an innovation is only disruptive if it starts in a “low-end foothold,” serving less-demanding customers, or a “new-market foothold,”