Episode 9: What does disruption mean?

Welcome to the Smart Startup English Podcast!

Our goal is to help startup professionals take their English from intermediate to advanced in just 10 minutes a day. In each episode, we’ll talk about a topic related to the startup world, and we’ll learn some vocabulary that you can use to sound more natural in your day-to-day business interactions in English.

In this episode, we’re talking about the meaning of the word disruption. We’ll also learn about the subtle difference between innovation and disruptive innovation.

But first, let me ask you this:

What kind of products would you consider disruptive?

According to Clay Christensen, the Harvard professor who coined the term disruptive innovation, there are two types of disruptive products.

The first type of product can serve a market that wasn’t served before, so basically discovering a new type of customer. This is also known as a new-market disruption.

The second type of product offers a cheaper or easier alternative to an existing product. This is called a low-end disruption.

For a product to be considered disruptive, it needs to pose a threat to the big players in the industry. If something poses a threat, that means that it’s creating a difficult or challenging situation. The big players in an industry are established, big companies that have a large market share in that industry.

In this lesson, we’ll teach you 8 Business English terms you need to know to talk about innovation and disruption.

A few words we’ll talk about are:

to pose a threat
market demand
prohibitive

Here’s the episode audio.

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