Even Something As Analog As A Toothbrush Can Be Digitally Disrupted

James McQuivey

URL

James McQuivey is Vice President, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, serving CMOs.

Recent Posts

For as long as there has been digital disruption, there have been those who have breathed a sigh of relief that it wasn’t going to happen to them.

Newspapers started to shut down and the music business lost half its revenue over a painful decade. People in analog industries thanked their lucky stars that digital would never disrupt them.

After all, how could digital disruption ever affect things as physical as toothbrushes, as regulated as banking, and as secretive as military camouflage?

Yet now each of these once safe industries is ripe for complete digital disruption. How is that possible? Because the definition of disruption has changed. Before digital, diligent readers of Clayton Christensen’s seminal work on disruptive innovation committed to memory the proposition that disruption requires a replacement of one product with another. Just as diesel excavators were replaced by hydraulic excavators and mainframe computers were disrupted by PCs, so were CD albums replaced by digital music tracks.