It is possible that Bitcoin will fork at some point. The question is whether or not it'll be a contentious fork. This process is a good thing in the long term, though potentially disruptive in the short term.
Bitcoin is both disruptive from a technology perspective, but there's a tremendous power of social good behind it. So you can both build a cool business or have a great investment return, and there's the promise of potentially improving the remittance industry or banking the unbanked.
As companies become bigger, the global environment more competitive, and the rate of disruptive technological innovation ever faster, the value to shareholders of attracting the best possible CEO increases correspondingly.
The reason why it is so difficult for existing firms to capitalize on disruptive innovations is that their processes and their business model that make them good at the existing business actually make them bad at competing for the disruption.
A disruptive innovation is a technologically simple innovation in the form of a product, service, or business model that takes root in a tier of the market that is unattractive to the established leaders in an industry.
Disruption is a process, not an event, and innovations can only be disruptive relative to something else.
The principles of disruptive innovation are indeed intended to be guidelines to assist managers both in introducing disruptive innovations as well as identifying disruptive developments in their market.
Companies, in fact, are specifically organized to under-invest in disruptive innovations! This is one reason why we often suggest that companies set up separate teams or groups to commercialize disruptive innovations. When disruptive innovations have to fight with other innovations for resources, they tend to lose out.
Smart companies fail because they do everything right. They cater to high-profit-margin customers and ignore the low end of the market, where disruptive innovations emerge from.
I don't feel that this concept of disruptive technology is the solution for everybody. But I think it's very important for innovators to understand what we've learned about established companies' motivation to target obvious profitable markets - and about their inability to find emerging ones. The evidence is just overwhelming.
