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Disruptive innovation has been the game changer in a lot of industries, eliminating the incumbents with better offerings. This article identifies what accounts as disruptive innovation and the conditions that make the innovation qualify as disruptive. Then the focus shifts to the types of disruptive innovations present namely product, process and business model innovation, and the various dimensions to them. In the end, the article identifies the transformative process of the disruptive innovation from the niche to the mainstream and the requirement to adapt as a need for the incumbent

organisation.

Growth is an important objective for any business to push forward and stay relevant in the highly competitive environment that it operates in. Disruptive innovation is such a growth-driven innovation which creates a new value model that

An innovation is termed disruptive only if the source is economically and resource-wise less sound than the incumbent businesses in the industry. These entrants then change the game of the industry through a better offering that exceed in functional or economic value to the consumer, or both. Adoption of these offerings, which present a higher customer value and better services, leads to a disruptive industry-wide innovation. History speaks of many such examples where the industry environment has been revolutionised through such innovations. Some examples are the hit-on-the-mainframe and mini-computer markets after the advent of personal computers, obsolescence of CRT after the introduction of LCDs and LED and the growth of word-processing leading to a rapid decline of the typewriter market. According to Harvard, disruptive innovations originate due to markets referred to as low-end and new market footholds. These are those less-profitable, less demanding customers that the incumbent businesses do not pay much attention to. This segment demands low performance renders the previous in-use technology obsolete.