How Disruptive Innovation Theory predicted the rise of the iPhone

actven.com

7 points·ActVen··4 comments

There is nothing in the article that has anything to do with the title. Article just states that the iPhone was an example of 'New-Market Disruption' - not exactly breakthrough information in 2013 - and that you need to use different performance measures for disruptions. Obviously. The difficulty is in deciding which new performance measures are actually valuable to consumers, and the article or this theory doesn't seem to help there.

ie. iPhone had great multimedia and web browsing performance, but those new rugged phones that came out around the same time had great resistance to knocks and battery performance.

I don't think "predicted" is the right word...

It may be more accurate to say that "DIT may help explain the iPhone's initial poor reviews and subsequent apparent success."

If anything, predictions based on the innovator's dilemma were wrong: http://daringfireball.net/2012/07/iphone_disruption_five_yea...

I think disruptive innovation is a very useful concept, but this just goes to show how hard it is to apply a priori.

I actually thought about mentioning that article. I think it is important to point out that someone who outlines a theory as broad as disruptive innovation is not always the best person to apply it in every situation. I think he made a mistake when he chose the competitive frame for the iPhone to be all cell phones. I think the right competitive frame is smart phones. That makes all the difference in the assessment.

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