# Disruption / Why incumbents lose

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Category: Business
Slides: 13
Updated: 2026-05-15T22:19:35.150Z
Tags: catalog, business, disruption

## Summary

A working brief on Clayton Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation — the patterns by which dominant firms, doing everything textbooks recommend, lose their markets to upstarts they could have crushed. Key sections include: DISRUPTION / Why incumbents lose; The Innovator's Dilemma: well-managed firms, well-executed strategies — and still they fall.; Sustaining innovation — what incumbents are built to do.; Disruptive innovation — starts inferior, in places no one important cares about.; Technology improves faster than customers' ability to absorb it. The disruptor crosses the demand line from below.; Kodak vs. digital cameras. Integrated steel vs. minimills.; The incumbent's most profitable customers do not want the disruptive product. So building it is, by every quarterly metric, a bad idea.; Resources, Processes, Values — the three layers that make a mature firm incapable of disruptive moves.; The same shape, different decade.; Not every collapse is "true Christensen disruption." Selection bias and definition drift have weakened the theory..

## Slide Outline

1. DISRUPTION / Why incumbents lose
2. The Innovator's Dilemma: well-managed firms, well-executed strategies — and still they fall.
3. Sustaining innovation — what incumbents are built to do.
4. Disruptive innovation — starts inferior, in places no one important cares about.
5. Technology improves faster than customers' ability to absorb it. The disruptor crosses the demand line from below.
6. Kodak vs. digital cameras. Integrated steel vs. minimills.
7. The incumbent's most profitable customers do not want the disruptive product. So building it is, by every quarterly metric, a bad idea.
8. Resources, Processes, Values — the three layers that make a mature firm incapable of disruptive moves.
9. The same shape, different decade.
10. Not every collapse is "true Christensen disruption." Selection bias and definition drift have weakened the theory.
11. Practical responses — mostly organisational, not technical.
12. A genuinely powerful frame — sometimes overused, often misapplied, still indispensable.
13. For further work.

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