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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 April 2021
In 1993, four years prior to the publication of Clayton Christensen's highly influential book, The Innovator's Dilemma, the Business History Review published an article by Christensen titled “The Rigid Disk Drive Industry: A History of Commercial and Technological Turbulence.” The article relates the theory of disruptive innovation to Alfred D. Chandler's work on large vertically integrated enterprises. It was published during a pivotal era of scholarship on innovation, management practice, and industry evolution, much of which used the history of firms, industries, and technologies to build theory. I survey the impact and critiques of Christensen's research agenda, highlighting how it illustrates where the boundaries associated with the “lessons of history” should be drawn.
I thank Walter Friedman, Geoff Jones, Josh Lerner, Rory McDonald, Richard Tedlow, Mary Tripsas, Mike Tushman, Derek Van Bever, and two anonymous referees for helpful comments and constructive criticisms. Funding was provided by the Division of Research and Faculty Development at Harvard Business School.
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9 The other types are “architectural,” “revolutionary,” and “regular.” Clark continued his research in this area. In a 1997 Harvard Business Review article, Carliss Baldwin and Kim Clark took a historical perspective, from railroads to the computer industry, to inform managers on how to navigate through a new wave of architectural changes following a trend toward building products through subsystems. See Baldwin and Clark, “Managing in the Age of Modularity,” Harvard Business Review, Sep./Oct. 1997, 84–93.
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13 Technically he uses the term “spinout,” as these firms were often founded by employees who had defected from incumbent firms. However, the terms “spinoff” and “spinout” are often used interchangeably in the literature. Some authors define a spinout as a new company formed by employees that has no direct link to the parent company, as distinguished from spinoffs, where the ties are loosely maintained. Because these instances are rarely fully separable, I use the term “spinoff” here, and later in the article, to refer to both types of entity.
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