Ride-hailing app Uber, which is undermining established taxi businesses worldwide, is not “genuinely disruptive”, according to the architect of the theory behind “disruptive innovation”.
In a defence of the controversial 20-year-old concept, Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School says the approach often hailed by tech entrepreneurs is “widely misunderstood” and often misapplied, and is “in danger of becoming a victim of its own success”.
In the latest edition of Harvard Business Review, he and co-authors Michael Raynor and Rory McDonald write that “essential refinements in the theory over the past 20 years have been overshadowed by the popularity of the initial formulation”.