Ti Case Study

No to TDI – Opponents:

Although there are many naysayers, the one most opposing view on TDI that gripped my attention came from Andrew King and Baljir Baatartogtokh, in their article, “How Useful Is the Theory of Disruptive Innovation?”. King and Baatartogtokh did acknowledge the reputation of TDI in the business word; they however stated that the theory has not been sufficiently tested in academia. To make their points, King and Baatartogtokh decided to survey a number of experts, with majority in academia, on each of the 77 disruptions cases depicted in Christensen’s “The Innovator Dilemma”. They found that many of the exemplary cases cited in the book didn’t really fit the four key conditions and predictions of the TDI, only that 7 out of

This argument followed the Uber and Apple-disruption mishaps. They also stated that TDI mainly looks at the customers and ignores the supply side. Thus, the reason behind TDI inability to predict disruptive forces like Uber or

Many researchers have displayed their disbelief toward the predictive use of the theory for incumbent firms. To contradict those allegations, proponents of TDI, such as Schmidt, Paap, and Katz, have proposed few new concepts based on Christensen’s theory which may give companies some hindsight on when a market is up for disruption. A particularly interesteing framework to assess disruptive potential of an innovation was presented by Hang et al. (2011) . This framework, based on TDI, is comprised of three main parts: market positioning, technology and other drivers (see Figure 2 in Appendix). Each category has a set of questions with “yes” or “no” answers. An in-depth study of the case to be assessed is however necessary in order to answer the questions; but, the assessment is done as