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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mike Buckley who wrote (11590)	11/30/1999 11:08:00 PM
From: Tom Ardnij	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

Mike, I think that a discontinuous innovation and a disruptive technology are very nearly the same. However, the context is typically different. We think of a discontinuous innovation relative to early stage gorilla gaming. The context of a disruptive technology is one that comes in under an overserved market. By overserved I mean one in which the incumbent technologies have continued to improve their core technology beyond the normal requirements of the marketplace. This enables a disruptive technology to come in on the low end and better meet a low end requirement. They typically do so with smaller, cheaper technology. Examples of successful disrupters abound. To name a few. Online-trading disrupting the major houses for the retail market thus addressing a previously unserved market. Continuous cast steel starting with rebar and moving on up the chain to flat roll. Closer to home for we gamers. Optical fiber displacing traditional cable and telecom Optical Switches(Gorilla making proprietary JDSU type) Java applets Handhelds-Windows CE overserves--Palm OS disrupts Application Server Farms At the core of Clayton Christensen's work on disruptive technologies is trying to figure out why great companies fail to adequately address the disrupters. A great case study is the move from 14" hard drives to 8" to 4.5" and 3.5" and so on. As it turns out different companies lead each evolution. The original company inevitably concentrated on improving its technology even as a new company came in with the next generation. Typically, the new entrant was initially inferior, but it inevitably opened up a new unserved market. In the case of these disk drives the new markets were the evolution from mainframe, mini-computer,microcomputer and desktop. Typically, a disrupter starts out with a modular approach at the low end. They then work on up the ladder. I'm afraid that my explanation is entirely inadequate. My suggestion is that we gorilla gamers include The Innovator's Dilemma as an additional source of understanding of the opportunities in front of us. Best Regards, Tom

To: Mike Buckley who wrote (11590)	12/1/1999 12:14:00 AM
From: Percival 917	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

Good Evening Mike, I am actually about one fourth of the way through Dilemma and the author does use disruptive and discontinuous in somewhat different context than the FM does. In his introduction he has a section on sustaining versus disruptive technologies and he states: Most new technologies foster improved product performance. I call these sustaining technologies. (basically our continuous innovations)Some sustaining technologies can be "discontinuous" or radical in character, while others are of an incremental nature. An important finding in this book is that RARELY have even the most radically difficult sustaining technologies precipitated the failure of leading firms. Occasionally, however, "disruptive technologies" emerge: technologies that result in "worse" product performance, at least in the near term. Ironically it was the disruptive technologies that precipitated the leading firms' demise. Products based on disruptive technologies are typically cheaper, simpler, smaller, and, frequently, more convenient to use. After rereading it, it does appear that his disruptive technology is essentially the same as our discontinuous, but his specifically mentioning discontinuous at first seemed at odds with our view. It's late and I hope I am not babbling here. Joel