Measuring the Unpredictability of Disruptive Change: The Comparison of the Inkjet Printer and Digital Photography

Disruptive innovation has become a core topic for technology management and indeed a central aspect of the modern industrial revolution. Although considerable attention has been devoted to its emergent properties and selection outcomes, less focus has been given to understand how disruption emerges through evolving and complex interactions that occur during that process. To address this shortfall, this article draws on chaos theory to examine the nature of disruptive innovation as a nonlinear dynamic system. Disruptive innovation can be considered nonlinear because it is time-dependent and deviation-absorbing, and it revolves around identifiable types of attractors appearing in a deterministic context or trajectory. To illustrate and advance these ideas, we study inkjet printer and digital photography technologies using patent application data collected from the United States Patent and Trademark Office. We employ a nonlinear analysis of the correlation dimension to measure the unpredictability of disruptive change and found that both chosen technologies evolved through a nonlinear dynamic process. Furthermore, in light of chaos theory and by way of comparison, we indicated two types of disruption: high-dimensional and low-dimensional chaos. Implications for innovation theory and business practice are explored herein.