The term disruptive technology was first attributed Clayton Christensen in his 1997 book The Innovator’s Dilemma in which he differentiates between sustainable innovations (creating value-added products) and disruptive innovations.
Disruptive innovations produce cheaper, lower margin, poorer-quality products that target less profitable customers in order to undercut existing businesses in order to eventually dominate that sector. While he no doubt identified a fundamentally new business model, he was far from an iconic visionary, later going on to forecast (somewhat inaccurately) the failure of Apple’s iPhone!
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