In his book The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail published in 1997, Clayton Christensen provided evidence for disruptions in the hard disk drive industry by examining the technological changes of disk drives. Christensen observed that while each product transitions of disk drives pointed towards straightforward technologies, most established firms failed. By building up a failure framework, Christensen argues that the failures of established firms to respond to simple technological changes lie in their past experience of how they identified and addressed market needs. This thesis critically examines the arguments and evidences in Christensen's work, and concludes that neither the arguments nor evidences are compelling....[ Read more ]

In his book The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail published in 1997, Clayton Christensen provided evidence for disruptions in the hard disk drive industry by examining the technological changes of disk drives. Christensen observed that while each product transitions of disk drives pointed towards straightforward technologies, most established firms failed. By building up a failure framework, Christensen argues that the failures of established firms to respond to simple technological changes lie in their past experience of how they identified and addressed market needs. This thesis critically examines the arguments and evidences in Christensen's work, and concludes that neither the arguments nor evidences are compelling.

The thesis consists of two main parts. First, it critically examines the disruption model, the underlying framework elucidating the phenomenon observed in the hard disk drive industry. By re-examining the industry from 1986 to 1988 with the same data source as Christensen's, the thesis concludes that the model is not supported by the empirical data in the industry. Second, it revisits and discusses the failures of the established firms in the industry history. Through the same case study as in Christensen's, the thesis suggests alternative explanations to these firms' failures and argues that the original analysis of Christensen is deficient.