Here is an excerpt from an article written by Donald Sull for Harvard Business Review and the HBR Blog Network. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, obtain subscription information, and receive HBR email alerts, please click here.

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After a long and successful run, the theory of disruptive innovation has come under attack of late. Last year, The New Yorker published a piece by Jill Lepore, a history professor at Harvard, attacking the whole idea as overblown and based on shoddy scholarship. In a recent Sloan Management Review article, Dartmouth professor Andrew King asked “How Useful Is the Theory of Disruptive Innovation?” and concluded it’s not nearly as valuable as its proponents argue.

My own take is that Clay Christensen and his co-authors on the theory made a substantial contribution to our understanding of innovation. In particular, Christensen’s research offers a powerful lens for understanding why incumbents so often lose to upstarts attacking from the low end of the market. Disruptors adopt a new technology and target a market segment that doesn’t matter to incumbents, then ride improvements in the technology to expand into established players’ core customer base. Leaders in the incumbent firms face a very real dilemma: Invest to sustain their current business — which is proven and profitable — or venture into new territory and jeopardize their core business through lost focus or cannibalization.

Disruptive innovation is a parsimonious theory that explains many business failures. But not all.

And that is the critical insight getting lost in the crossfire between the theory’s disciples and its critics. Businesses fail to respond to innovation for many reasons, and no single theory can be expected to explain every case. Fortunately, disruptive innovation does not have to. Christensen’s work is part of a rich body of research that, taken as a whole, explains more than any single theory can.

Christensen’s initial work was done during the 1990s when a group of scholars, many at Harvard Business School, were studying why established companies, like Polaroid or DEC, struggled to adapt to technological change despite ample resources, talented engineers, and admired leaders. For more than a decade, this community chipped away at the question — applying different frameworks, studying different industries, and generating a set of insights that deepened our understanding of why good companies go bad.

In a 1990 seminal study of the semiconductor equipment industry, Kim Clark and Rebecca Henderson argued that the organization and knowledge flows of high technology companies reflect the architecture of their underlying product. When the product architecture changes, by reconfiguring how the components are integrated into a system, for example, established players often struggle to adapt. Their organizational structure, which still embodies the old product architecture, is difficult and time consuming to change.

Two years later, Dorothy Leonard-Barton published the findings from a study of 20 innovation projects at companies including Ford, HP, and Chaparral Steel. Firms, Leonard-Barton found, had to invest heavily to build technical competencies required to excel along a set technical trajectory. These capabilities were deeply rooted in an organization’s routines, but also in its culture. When faced with a new technology, however, market leaders often found their historical capabilities were poorly suited to new conditions and difficult to change. Core competencies became core rigidities.

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