Small but not least changes: The Art of Creating Disruptive Innovations

Abstract: In the ever-evolving landscape of technology, product innovation thrives on replacing outdated technologies with groundbreaking ones or through the ingenious recombination of existing technologies. Our study embarks on a revolutionary journey by genetically representing products, extracting their chromosomal data, and constructing a comprehensive phylogenetic network of automobiles. We delve deep into the technological features that shape innovation, pinpointing the ancestral roots of products and mapping out intricate product-family triangles. By leveraging the similarities within these triangles, we introduce a pioneering "Product Disruption Index"-inspired by the CD index (Funk and Owen-Smith, 2017)-to quantify a product's disruptiveness. Our approach is rigorously validated against the scientifically recognized trend of decreasing disruptiveness over time (Park et al., 2023) and through compelling case studies. Our statistical analysis reveals a fascinating insight: disruptive product innovations often stem from minor, yet crucial, modifications.