Disruptive Innovation

In the article "Disruptive Innovation", Douglas C. Merrill believes that disruptive innovation is superior to the incremental innovation. Disruptive innovation arises from knowing the needs of users in life in order to fulfill their unmet needs. Their requests will be slightly differentiated from the existing product. What users say is not prioritized as they can only envision what they already have. Disruptive innovation also creates a new ecosystem that benefits the innovator, users across other sectors and customers of the other innovators and ecosystem members. The ecosystem does not just help on one particular company; it spans all industries. Since an entire ecosystem is not created by incremental innovation, it has to follow the nature of ecosystem which has already been created by disruptive innovation.

Disruptive innovation enables industries to produce goods and services which are selling in much lower price. It also improves the production of goods, resulting in better quality as the new innovation has apparently lowered down the cost price due to improvement in production techniques. New innovation has also expanded the market because it is specially designed for consumers from different domain to fulfill their various needs in life. For instance, the introduce of pocket calculator after the intervention of microprocessor by Intel has eventually replaced the electronic calculator which was more complicated to function and was not portable due to its large and heavy desktop machine design. The modern calculator is more affordable, portable and user friendly. Battery has also been replaced by rechargable batteries which will decrease the consumption of power. This intervention has helped many sectors by minimising the load of work as well as improve their performance in work.

Other than that, disruptive innovation also creates new industries that may replace or destroy the existing industry. The existing industry which will be substituted by another disruptive innovation will experience competitive pressure. Therefore, a major market disruption will occur if the industry is overtaken by the new competitors. It will then undermine other related industries as well. One of the good examples is the intervention of cell phones. Cell phone is not only be used to make calls but now, it also supports additional services such as messaging, surfing net, photographing and also listening to musics due to the technology advances. Not only telecommunication industry was disrupted, the intervention has also become a substitution to many other devices, such as MPS player, camera or even computer. Phones call or email is replaced with SMS, watches are getting obviated as date and time are shown on cell phone, alarm clock is also being substituted. No one would have actually thought that cell phones would be a threat to these industries.

All in all, disruptive innovation is superior to the incremental