The crucial point isn't that it's a technology disruption, but a business disruption, in the sense that (1) customers of the new technology have different needs (or ranking of needs); (2) vendors of the new technology need to supply it in different ways.
One example from the book, on disk drives, is that in moving to smaller disk drives that were more popular in laptops, (1) for customers who valued small physical size and mechanical robustness over storage size and cost per MB; (2) the manufacturers of which came out with new models twice as quickly as the previous size (incumbent organizations found it difficult to change all their internal procedures to adapt to this new rhythm, new sales channels, new customer demographic - everything changes, both "build something" and "that people want", not just the tech).
Because it's not a technology problem, but a business problem, the proposed solution is not a separate tech lab, but a separate business unit - one that can be happy with tiny sales, and that can be organized by the needs, ranking of needs, and rhythms of the new market.
[It seems to me that sadly, this amounts to a startup, which the incumbent owns; this will save them financially, but won't save their organization.]
A current example is ARM CPUs in smartphones, which appear to have disrupted intel x86 architecture. But I hesitate to count intel out - they've been around the disruption cycle a few times (having invented the microprocessor and integrated circuit).
The crucial point isn't that it's a technology disruption, but a business disruption, in the sense that (1) customers of the new technology have different needs (or ranking of needs); (2) vendors of the new technology need to supply it in different ways.
One example from the book, on disk drives, is that in moving to smaller disk drives that were more popular in laptops, (1) for customers who valued small physical size and mechanical robustness over storage size and cost per MB; (2) the manufacturers of which came out with new models twice as quickly as the previous size (incumbent organizations found it difficult to change all their internal procedures to adapt to this new rhythm, new sales channels, new customer demographic - everything changes, both "build something" and "that people want", not just the tech).
Because it's not a technology problem, but a business problem, the proposed solution is not a separate tech lab, but a separate business unit - one that can be happy with tiny sales, and that can be organized by the needs, ranking of needs, and rhythms of the new market.
[It seems to me that sadly, this amounts to a startup, which the incumbent owns; this will save them financially, but won't save their organization.]
A current example is ARM CPUs in smartphones, which appear to have disrupted intel x86 architecture. But I hesitate to count intel out - they've been around the disruption cycle a few times (having invented the microprocessor and integrated circuit).