The main reason “disruptive” causes confusion is that it sounds like “major upset,” which suggests that the technological cause should be major as well. This leads us to falsely conflate disruptive innovation with technically radical innovation. So we end up confusing disruptive with radical and sustaining with incremental. The two are orthogonal axes.

In fact, in most documented cases of disruption, the disruptive innovation was a minor/incremental change and well within the technical capabilities of the incumbent (and was often taken to market by a renegade spin off from the original company).

What's interesting here is the the perspective that the *market* decides what's disruptive. It doesn't have to be out-of-the-blue types of heavy duty technological innovations.

Small changes technically can be disruptive if they change market behaviors.