Disruptive Innovation & Creative Destruction

While sustaining innovation does not create new market but just evolves existing value networks, disruptive innovation or disruptive technology - the former is now preferred - creates a new market and value networks. However, as Bower and Christensen mentioned, only few companies may be able to overcome the handicaps of size or success when they are confronted with disruptive technologies. So, they “kindly” offer several tips for spotting and cultivating disruptive technologies, such as “determine whether the technology is disruptive or sustaining.” That sounds great, but how to do so? It doesn't seem to be so easy to discern in advance what the disruptive technologies are. I think, thus, there should be first a change in “mental model”, for instance, from the convergent thinking to divergent thinking. For that fundamental change in existing companies not in start-up firms, I’d like to rely on the concept of creative destruction

As describing capitalism as the perennial gale of creative destruction, Schumpeter argues that “… the opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation—if I may use that biological term—that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism …”

It seems to me that the perpetuity of capitalism itself is based on disruptive innovation because it is the “free market’s messy way of delivering progress.” It is, thus, sometimes said that the CEO (Chief Executive Officer) in the free market industry should be the CDO (Chief Destruction Officer).