Characteristics of Disruptive Innovations. A Description Model Focused on Technical products

Incumbent companies know how to scale markets and exploit existing products. However, studies show that more exploratory tasks such as new product development (NPD) still pose significant challenges considering NPD failure rates of ~40% depending on the industry. In contrast, new entrants seem to be more capable of delivering products that consumers really want. This phenomenon disruption received lots of resonance in the academic world resulting in a multitude of publications addressing various questions related to disruptive innovations. This paper distinguishes itself from the existing research by focusing on the inherent characteristics of disruptive innovations for technical products. For this, disruptive innovations are analyzed against the background of five innovation dimensions framing the description model: content, intensity, process, subject and success. The derived characteristics represent requirements that influence the planning and development of potentially disruptive innovations. By implementing these requirements into future planning and development methodologies, the authors hope to create more innovation adequate processes and, thus, improve NPD success rate.