There is no such thing as a disruptive technology.

The world of management is awash in buzzwords, fashionable phrases, and hollow concepts. This is a problem because misnaming a phenomenon prevents us from understanding it properly and therefore from managing it. A good example is the term “disruptive technology,” which is very misleading.

I recently spoke with the head of innovation at a large institution, and he told me: “The big difficulty we have is identifying which of all the new technologies are really disruptive”. The race is on to find the disruptive technologies that will really make a difference in the economic, social, and military arenas.

But this race is based on a mistake: there’s no such thing as a disruptive technology. What makes a technology disruptive is the way it is used. A technology can be radically new and not be disruptive. For example, when doctors switched from spiral-bound notebooks to microcomputers in their offices, there was a major technological change that improved their efficiency. But there was no change in their operating model (how the practice is organized, the business model, the structure of the players involved, etc.). It’s essentially the same thing, just more efficient. It’s a “sustainable” improvement in the sense that it supports and strengthens the existing model. Conversely, a major disruption can be achieved in an industry without any new technology. EasyJet, for example, is a pioneer in low-cost air travel. Its disruption is not based on proprietary or new technology – they have the the same aircrafts – but on a different business model.

What will make the difference is how the new technology is used. In the military field, the tank was a major invention that emerged at the end of the First World War. The French army put it at the service of the infantry, distributing it among its units to support its existing organization. The Germans, for their part, created special units (De Gaulle had the same idea, but it was not followed). They rethought their tactical model around this new technology. They turned it into a disruptive innovation by the way they used it, with the results we know. In other words, a technology is disruptive according to the model we develop around it to take advantage of it.

Beware of cramming

The temptation, when a new technology emerges, is always to integrate it to the existing model, which is seen as invariant; this is called “cramming”: we force it to fit into the existing model, so to speak. This model then becomes a kind of intellectual prison that prevents innovation. We have tanks, but the way we use them means we get only a tiny fraction of their potential. To fit the square into the round, you have to cut off all the corners. In other words, to cram a new technology into the model, you have to ignore everything that could be used to create a different model. This also explains why a new technology is more easily adopted by a new entrant to create a disruption: the new entrant is not locked into existing models, it has no historical activity to defend; it has no circle in which to fit the square. It builds the circle around the square precisely so that the circle is a disruption. Google has been working on AI for years, but didn’t want to risk its circle (its search business). OpenAI, a young startup that started out as a nonprofit, surprised them by using AI in a very different way.

The obsession with “disruptive technologies” has important consequences: we focus more on the technology than on its possible applications; we devote ourselves to art for art’s sake. We forget that the Germans didn’t invent tanks, but they figured out how to make the most of them. So, true innovation is not in the technology, although that is fundamental, but in the way we use it to create advantage. It’s about challenging existing models in order to invent new ones. The creation of a disruption therefore lies less in the capacity for invention than in the capacity for entrepreneurship.

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🇫🇷 French version of this article here.