Home / Summaries / The Economics of Innovation An Introduction / technologies-mainstream-market

Articles - Yu & Hang (2010)

4 important questions on Articles - Yu & Hang (2010)

There are two preconditions for such a market disruption to occur:

performance overshoot on the focal mainstream attributes of the existing product, and asymmetric incentives between existing healthy business and potential disruptive business.

There are two general classes of technologies:

(1) revolutionary, discontinuous, breakthrough, radical, emergent or step function technologies; (
2) evolutionary, continuous, incremental or ‘nuts and bolts’ technologies

According to their measure, a disruptive innovation should

(i) be inferior on the attributes that mainstream customers value;
(ii)offer new value propositions to attract a new customer segment orthe more price sensitive mainstream market; (iii) be sold at a lower price; and
(iv) penetrate the market from niche to mainstream.