If you Have a Disruptive Innovation, do your users Squirm?

Disruptive Innovation is assumed to be a game changer.  

disruptive innovation is an innovation that helps create a new market and value network, and eventually disrupts an existing market and value network (over a few years or decades), displacing an earlier technology. The term is used in business and technology literature to describe innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically first by designing for a different set of consumers in a new market and later by lowering prices in the existing market.

This is contrast to Sustaining Innovation where 

In contrast to disruptive innovation, a sustaining innovation does not create new markets or value networks but rather only evolves existing ones with bettervalue, allowing the firms within to compete against each other's sustaining improvements.

You could put Sustaining Innovation on one end of the scale and put Disruptive Innovation on the other end and your new service fits somewhere on the line.  But, where does it fit?  Here is one way to judge where you fit.  When you discuss your service do you find some people squirm?


  1. 1.
    wriggle or twist the body from side to side, esp. as a result of nervousness or discomfort.

Why is squirm an indicator?  Because if you are disrupting things, then some people are going to be uncomfortable with the change.  Seems to be innovative, you are going to make more people squirm.  Sound crazy? I am thinking how to make more people squirm which means the technology we are developing is more disruptive and creating new markets.