Topic 3 Covers:
- Technology ‘S curves’
- Disruptive innovation (technological discontinuity)
Lecture handouts
Key Sources
- Tidd and Bessant (2009), ch 1, ch 5
- Conway and Steward (2009), ch 4-5
- Schilling, M (2006), Types and patterns of innovation [ch 3 - sample from McGraw-Hill]
- Bower, J and Christensen, C (1995), Disruptive Technologies: Catching the wave, Harvard Business Review, Jan/Feb p43-54 [EBSCO]
- Christensen, C and Raynor, M (2003), Six keys to creating new-growth business, Harvard management update, Jan v8 i1 p3-7 [EBSCO]
- Christensen, C (2002), The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail
, Collins
- Christensen, C, Aaron, S and Clark, W (2003), Disruption in Education, Educause
- Schonfeld, E (2004), Disruption theory, Business2.0
- Thomond, P, Lettice, F & Herzberg, T (2003), Disruptive Innovation: Removing the Innovators Dilemma, British Academy of Management Annual Conference
- Carr, N (2005), Top-Down Disruption, Strategy+Business Spring [requires free registration]
Additional Sources
Hockenberry, J (2006), Building a Better Battery, Wired, v14 i11 November
“… Lithium-ion technology may be approaching its limits. Batteries conform to technical restrictions set by nature and don’t obey Moore’s law like most of the digital world. In the last 150 years, battery performance has improved only about eightfold (or less, depending how it’s measured). The speed and capacity of silicon chips, of course, improves that much every six years. “Li-ion is an extremely mature technology, and all of the problems are known by everybody,” says Art Ramirez, the chief of device physics at Bell Labs. “They aren’t going to change.” [See the chart of performance improvements over time of HDDs vs processors vs Li-Ion Batteries - not quite a technology s-curve,as it doesn't measure R&D effort, but it has half the picture - the technical performance]
From digit-life.com, the 2005 overview of the Hard Disk Drive (HDD) market and technology, 2004 overview of the desktop HDD market , 2003 overview of the state of the hard disk drive (HDD) market – Useful data and examples of
firms and products.
Steve’s digicams site offers a detailed breakdown (often literally) of microdrive storage devices – the 1″ and 0.85″ HDDs. Again, this is useful for identifying key players in the market and some performance criteria.
- Brown, R (1992), Managing the “S” curves of innovation, Journal of Consumer Marketing, Winter v9 i1 p61-72
- Christensen, C and Overdorf, M (2000), Meeting the challenge of disruptive change, Harvard Business Review, Mar/Apr v78 i2 p66-76 [EBSCO]
- McGinn, Daniel (2003), The master of innovation, BusinessWeek, 17th Nov v 142 i20 pE6-9 [EBSCO]
- Schrage, M (2004), Disruptive incrementalism, Technology Review, Mar p20
- McGahan, A (2000), How industries evolve, Business Strategy Review, Autumn v11 i3 p1-16 [EBSCO]
- Mourkogiannis, Nikos (2006), Purpose and Innovation, strategy+business enews, Oct 26 [requires free registration]
- Anthony, S, Johnson, M and Eyring, M (2004), A Diagnostic for Disruptive Innovation, Working Knowledge [Harvard Business School], Aug 9th
See Hard drive/ Storage archive from Tech in the News
Other reading
Anthony, S (2007), Radiohead’s Disruptive Innovation, Harvard Business Online, Oct 10th
6/10/06 Rebuilding Microsoft Bill Gates is on his way out. Now it’s up to Ray Ozzie to revive the flagging giant – and get it ready for the post-desktop era. [Wired] … Microsoft has been in a funk since 2003. Its travails could be the subject of a Harvard Business School case study on the innovator’s dilemma [Clayton Christensen - see disruptive innovation] . The company made – and still makes – billions selling desktop software, mainly Windows and Office. But the center of gravity has moved, and desktop software is about as cutting-edge as a nightly network newscast. Instead, Web-based apps are taking hold, and devices other than the PC – smartphones, iPods, digicams – represent the growth markets for software. At the same time, new business models, like search-based advertising and low-cost software subscriptions, are beginning to generate big money. [Wired] 
The Register’s HDD collection of articles
