Epic Disruptions: 11 Innovations That Shaped Our Modern World
Scott D. Anthony
Harvard Business Review Press (September 2025)
How disruptive innovation can create tomorrow’s great companies while causing today’s great companies to fail
According to Scott Anthony, “Disruption is an engine of progress” in the business world. In fact, the impact of several has had a wide and deep impact throughout the world.
Clay Christensen was Anthony’s Harvard Business School professor and then colleague as well as one of his closest friends. “Clay’s research highlighted two types of innovations: those that [begin italics] sustain [end italics] an established trajectory and those that [begin italics] disrupt [end italics] by trading off performance along dimensions that historically mattered to mainstream customers through improved performance on different dimensions. In other words, the disruption is less [begin italics] good [end italics] in some way, typically in terms of raw performance, and in historically overlooked dimensions such as simplicity and affordability.”
He limits his primary attention to eleven “epic innovations,” all of which are unique in ways to varying extent. They are:
o Gunpower (9th century)
o Printing Press (1440)
o Scientific Revolution (16th and 17th centuries)
o Florence Nightingale (1820-1910)
o Ford’s Model T (1908)
o Transistor (1947)
o Julia Child (1912-2004)
o McDonald’s/Des Plaines, IL (1955)
o Disposable diapers/Pampers (1961)
o Nucor Steel/minimills (1964)
o The Apple iPhone (June 2007)
Anthony: “By making the complicated simple and the expensive affordable, [disruption] transforms how we work, play, live, and communicate. Each of these disruptive innovations may have caught many people by surprise but, as Anthony expresses it so well, many epic disruptions viewed as “overnight successes” had languished for decades in trial-and-error development.
Scott Anthony’s final thoughts include these: “Disruption casts a shadow, and there are many, many issues to confront. The most challenging ones are likely those we can’t see today. Nonetheless, disruption has historically allowed more people to do things that matter to them. It transforms what exists and create what doesn’t, by making the expensive affordable and the complex simple. I believe in the power of disruption to make the world a better place.
“The world is a complicated place, and there are no easy answers. Clay’s teaching transformed how I looked at the world. My own research, field work, and teaching have further refined what I see and how I make sense of the world around me. I hope this book similarly sharpens your lenses, helping you see what you would otherwise miss. What you do with that, of course, is up to you.