Debating Disruptive Innovation

Few MIT Sloan Management Review articles garner as much attention as Andrew A. King and Baljir Baatartogtokh's article How Useful Is the Theory of Disruptive Innovation? in the fall 2015 issue. After interviewing and surveying 79 industry experts, King and Baatartogtokh concluded that many of the 77 industry cases cited as examples of disruptive innovation by Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen and his coauthor Michael E. Raynor did not actually fit four of the theory's key elements well.



King and Baatartogtokh's article attracted the attention of a number of media outlets -- and generated a number of interesting responses. In the essays here, two authors -- Juan Pablo Vázquez Sampere of IE Business School and Martin J. Bienenstock of the law firm Proskauer Rose LLP -- take issue with King and Baatartogtokh's conclusions. A third author, Ezra W. Zuckerman of the MIT Sloan School of Management, explores an intriguing question: What if the most important aspects of the theory of disruptive innovation are something different from what its proponents -- and its detractors -- emphasize?



(Editor's note: Also among MIT Sloan Management Review's spring 2016 articles is Keep Calm and Manage Disruption, written by Joshua S. Gans of the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, in which he discusses King and Baatartogtokh's findings in the context of his own research on disruption.)