Disruptive Technologies - Publications - Faculty & Research

01 Apr 2000
News

At Cyberposium, Amazon's Bezos Debunks Internet Myths

movie theaters did with the advent of television. Myth #2: There are no barriers to entry on the Internet. What about the huge sums, asked Bezos, that Amazon and other e-commerce companies invest in their businesses? Barriers to entry are actually getting higher in the... View Details

20 Aug 2024
Book

Why Competing With Tech Giants Requires Finding Your Own Edge

turn, strengthens their bargaining position against each of these technology behemoths. To hub or not to hub: Finding the right path to grow your ecosystem When building an ecosystem, companies have choices: they can be a hub or a... View Details

Keywords: by Feng Zhu; Technology; Technology

07 Dec 2016
HBS Case

Why Millennials Flock to Fintech for Personal Investing

Millennials are disruptive bunch. The first generation to grow up with the internet, consumers born after 1980 are used to relying on technology and engineering to do almost everything—including shopping... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Financial Services

01 Feb 2002
News

Health Industry Alumni Convene for Conference

analyses. Afternoon sessions included a presentation by HBS professor Clayton Christensen on disruptive technologies in health care; a panel, moderated by HBS professor Gary Pisano, on individually tailored... View Details

Keywords: Ambulatory Health Care Services; Health, Social Assistance

01 Mar 2017
News

HBX: Reimagining HBS for the Digital Age

When considering how to enter the digital learning arena, HBS did what any startup would do. It began in 2012 by identifying a challenge: How to merge the unique elements of the HBS learning experience with the latest technology to create... View Details

05 May 2011
News

Blazing a Trail for Glenn Beck

companies, Morgan said she has drawn inspiration and guidance from HBS professor Clay Christensen’s book, The Innovator’s Dilemma. In it, he describes his theory of how disruptive technologies help to... View Details

Keywords: News, Library, Internet, and Other Services; Information

01 Apr 1999
News

Q & A: Confronting New Technologies: When Doing Right Is Wrong

cognitive problem. The PCs simply did not make sense to DEC, given their customer context and their cost structure/business model. “Disruptive Tech 101” When Clay Christensen speaks of disruptive and sustaining technologies, he uses the... View Details

25 Sep 2000
Research & Ideas

More Than the Sum of Its Parts: The Impact of Modularity on the Computer Industry

whole system. In effect, each module was free to evolve along its own trajectory. By accommodating unforeseen, after-the-fact improvements, the modular approach unleashed value for the system as a whole. At the request of Working Knowledge, Dean Clark, an expert in... View Details

Keywords: by Staff; Technology; Technology; Technology

January 2025
Supplement

Wendell Weeks at Corning Inc.

By: Ryan Raffaelli

Keywords: Innovation and Invention; Innovation Strategy; Technological Innovation; Disruptive Innovation; Information Technology; Leadership; Health Pandemics; Technology Industry; United States; New York (city, NY)

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15 Dec 2024
News

Forward Thinking

You can ask the internet anything, but getting an answer via generative artificial intelligence consumes about 10 times more electricity than a traditional Google search. Consequently, the data centers where AI tools are trained and run are guzzling more and more... View Details

Keywords: Janine White; Illustrations by Richard Borge; Electric Power Generation, Transmission, Distribution; Utilities

26 Feb 2018
News

Teaching Farmers New Tricks of the Trade

have been going through major changes, both in the way that they actually farm their land, but then how they manage their businesses and run their businesses more like entrepreneurs, as opposed to the traditional ways that they've run their businesses. Farmers are very... View Details

November 2024
Supplement

AlphaGo (B): Birth of a New Intelligence

By: Shikhar Ghosh and Shweta Bagai

This case, the second in a three-part series, explores DeepMind's evolution from developing game-specific AI to more generalized learning systems. Following AlphaGo's 2017 victory over the Go world champion, DeepMind introduced two revolutionary systems that eliminated... View Details

Keywords: AI and Machine Learning; Games, Gaming, and Gambling; Technological Innovation; Disruptive Innovation; Innovation Leadership; Information Technology Industry; United States; Russia; China

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01 Mar 2009
News

A New Approach to Health-Care Reform

to merge with information from other facilities. There’s a new disruptive technology in the works, personal electronic health records (PEHRs), an open-source tool that collects data from all providers and... View Details

Keywords: Deborah Blagg; Health, Social Assistance

01 Jun 2017
News

Streamlining the Supermarket

whom he’d known since high school. They were equally intrigued. “We thought, why don’t we use that technology to disrupt the grocery industry by bringing the same type of efficiencies to the supermarket?”... View Details

Keywords: Francis Storrs

October 2016 (Revised March 2017)
Case

uberPOOL

By: Marco Iansiti, Michael W. Toffel and Amram Migdal

This case describes Uber's uberPOOL service, which let multiple Uber users who were headed in the same direction share a ride and pay substantially lower fares. View Details

Keywords: Uber; uberPOOL; Innovation and Invention; Disruptive Innovation; Innovation Strategy; Technological Innovation; Digital Platforms; Transportation; Transportation Networks; Information Technology Industry; Information Technology Industry; Information Technology Industry

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02 Mar 2015
Research & Ideas

Retail Reaches a Tipping Point—Which Stores Will Survive?

good work they have done, many still find themselves in a precarious situation with weak returns on invested capital. José Alvarez: There are a few other things that make this an inflection point. One is the fact that technological... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Retail

March 1998
Teaching Note

Electric Vehicles: Pipe Dream or Product of the Future? TN

By: Clayton M. Christensen

Teaching Note for (1-698-065). (A reprint not in this system). View Details

Keywords: Disruptive Innovation; Information Technology; Performance; Auto Industry

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February 2018
Case

Amazon, Google, and Apple: Smart Speakers and the Battle for the Connected Home

By: Rajiv Lal and Scott Johnson

Amazon, Google, and Apple all offer their own smart speaker. The devices represent each firm's entry point into the connected home market. All three companies come into the space with their own strengths and weaknesses. Who will win? View Details

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01 Sep 2014
News

Ask the Expert: Byte-Testing Bitcoin

increase? —Rob Kautz (MBA 1987) Many argue that anonymity is one of the key disruptions Bitcoin introduces. I think anonymity is valuable only in the early days and for a specific group of people. If we want Bitcoin to become more... View Details

Keywords: alumni; Data Processing, Hosting, and Related Services; Information

July 2008 (Revised September 2009)
Case

ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Eee PC (A)

By: Willy C. Shih, Chintay Shih, Hung-Chang Chiu, Yi-Ching Hsieh and Ho Howard Yu

ASUSTek Computer was the world's largest manufacture of PC motherboards, yet when it tried to launch its new sub-notebook Eee PC, the organization faced challenges in doing things outside of its established processes. Though many of the team members had worked together... View Details

Keywords: Change Management; Disruptive Innovation; Product Launch; Groups and Teams; Information Infrastructure; Mobile and Wireless Technology; Technology Industry

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