Disruptive technology and disruptive innovation are terms used in business and technology literature to describe innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically by being lower priced or designed for a different set of consumers. Disruptive innovations can be broadly classified into low-end and new-market disruptive innovations. A new-market disruptive innovation is often aimed at non-consumption (i.e., consumers who would not have used the products already on the market), whereas a lower-end disruptive innovation is aimed at mainstream customers for whom price is more important than quality.

Disruptive technologies are particularly threatening to the leaders of an existing market, because they are competition coming from an unexpected direction. A disruptive technology can come to dominate an existing market by either filling a role in a new market that the older technology could not fill (as cheaper, lower capacity but smaller-sized flash memory is doing for personal data storage in the 2000s) or by successively moving up-market through performance improvements until finally displacing the market incumbents (as digital photography has largely replaced film photography). In contrast to "disruptive innovation", a "sustaining" innovation does not have an effect on existing markets.

Sustaining innovations may be either "discontinuous" (i.e. "revolutionary") or "continuous" (i.e. "evolutionary"). Revolutionary innovations are not always disruptive. Although the automobile was a revolutionary innovation, it is not a disruptive innovation, because early automobiles were expensive luxury items that did not disrupt the market for horse-drawn vehicles.

The market remained intact until the debut of the lower priced Ford Model T in 1908.

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