Disruptive Technology

The Ways of Innovation and Technological Paths

After the second half of the 20th century, science and technology experienced an accelerated growth pace. Technoscience became an important component in promoting wealth. The economic, social, and environmental implications of this acceleration are inseparable from development and, deriving from analyses made by the business administration sector, their analytical use is inseparable from certain technologies and innovations. A set of technologies—atomic/nuclear, semiconductors, communications, computers and software, biotechnologies, and nanotechnologies, for example—spreads beyond the internal logic of scientific and technological research because it affects the production system and the social and subjective processes of selection of goods and services. Technological products hold great market value and become strategic in the commercial competition between companies and/or states as they impose a number of conditions—scientific, technical, legal (patents), and the training of highly qualified human resources—to their know-how process. Technological goods are becoming common in the daily routine of people and create a symbolic and material dependence as they become vital elements in the progressive composition of the human world. The degree of impact and the extrapolation of these innovations to other institutional spaces, such as different levels of political decision and commercial regulation and approval, is a determinative trait of disruptive technologies.

The idea of disruptive technology was originally conceived by Clayton M. Christensen in his book The Innovator's Dilemma, and then redefined—in the work The Innovator's Solution—as disruptive innovation. Its objective was to analyze the impact of technological transformations on the organization and dynamics of companies. Such approach highlights technological transformations as one of the basic conditions in modern economy and challenges approaches according to which innovation processes or technologies follow a continuous and regular development movement. Historically, technological changes withhold the relative balance of the set of processes that materialize products and services. A given technology is not merely the final materialization of a product, but a set of interconnected activities, such as research, labor, management, capital, infrastructure, information, and consumption. In The Innovator's Dilemma, Christensen typifies the diversity of arrangements and technological processes in two ways: established technologies, and disruptive technologies. The first follow their path by means of improvements, with technical increases within an established standard or according to a traditional manner of conceiving, producing, and selling an article. This occurs without great disruptions in the way by which things are done, in the organization of the market, and in the consumption culture of those technologies. Disruptive technologies cause significant changes in the projects and manufacturing processes of material culture articles. These products either create new markets or impose strong impacts on the symbolic attributions, social differentiation, and individual indulgence of consumers, as a function of their operational improvements, functionality, and accessibility.

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