In addition to advising firms to not conduct pep rallies in rap, Geoff Moore debates Tom Foremski's argument that all innovations are disruptive. He writes:

My pushback is that, if you are a member of the establishment, you do not want to overcome the inertia of the status quo. It works to your advantage. What you want to do is overcome the force of commoditization, which works to your disadvantage, eroding your margins. But you do not want to disrupt the market, because that creates too much opportunity for new entrants. What you need, therefore, is some kind of innovation that is not disruptive but does create new differentiation--essentially what all the othe forms of innovation I cite are all about.

Chances are, though, that this new innovation that allows you to differentiate yourself in a new way will disrupt someone else's market. For instance, the video iPod was a sustaining innovation for Apple's mobile hardware market -- it allowed the company to innovate in a way that differentiated its existing product, the mp3 iPod, from other mp3 players -- but it is a disruptive innovation in the sense that it introduced a new way to consume digital videos, and hence, if successful, could end up disrupting the DVD market and the video on-demand market by introducing a completely new way of consumption that established market leaders (i.e. Netflix) have trouble dealing with. So really, sustaining innovations and disruptive innovations are two sides of the same coin.

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