When Clayton Christensen came up with the concept of "disruptive innovation" it originally referred to a specific phenomenon. Normal innovation is when the larg

When Clayton Christensen came up with the concept of "disruptive innovation" it originally referred to a specific phenomenon. Normal innovation is when the large firms servicing a market make incremental improvements to their products, when those products already serve the market needs very well but at high cost. A disruptive innovation is when you can service some of the needs of the market with a worse product which is dramatically cheaper. Nowadays, people refer to disruption for anything and everything, but SpaceX could be an example of this classical definition. I say "could be" because I'm not totally sure that SpaceX's service is or was worse than other launch companies in a technical sense. Anyway, according to the theory when the much cheaper but worse technology gains momentum, it gets better and better, until it's serving the high-end needs even better than the original technology and at a lower cost.