Disruptive technologies force fundamental changes, displace existing products and services, prompt layoffs, cause prices to tumble and eventually depose entire industries. The only possible response from business is to forge new visions and find new ways to cope with a vastly - and often suddenly - transformed competitive landscape.

Disruptive technologies can, and do, let emerging companies - even those that start out as the smallest of small businesses - steal seemingly secure low-end, low-margin markets from incumbent players. Semiconductors were a disruptive technology that demolished the vacuum tube industry. Likewise the switch from slide rules to calculators, from telegraphs to telephones and from records to tapes to compact discs all destroyed industry leaders. Similarly the personal computer spelt the near extinction of the mini-computer industry, and Japanese digital watches provoked the decline of the once-renowned Swiss watchmakers.

Christensen can also explain why established companies - even those under the steerage of canny, capable executives - have difficulty either countering or embracing looming innovations of disruptive capacity. His notion is that organisations habitually develop mind-sets and processes that revolve around doing what they already know. When such a pattern is set it becomes extremely difficult for managers to justify to others, or even themselves, the need to revolutionise their processes in response to a barely emergent market change. By the time the threat is apparent to the larger organisation it tends to be too late: upstart companies have seized the lion's share of the emerging market.

Clearly understanding which technologies are likely to prove disruptive gives firms entrenched in established markets some hope of long-term survival without having to set up entirely new businesses; and that's work CSC has taken up with enthusiasm through its LEF program. "What we try to do is to continuously scan the marketplace around technology," Koff says. "We've been doing that in my organisation, which is a global group for CSC, for over 10 years.

"We found that working with Christensen helped us. [We were] scanning everything in the market [and] we were seeing those potential things that will change business going forward, but we didn't have a business framework to think about that," says Koff. "Christensen coined the term ‘disruptive technologies' and since then we've been using it as a framework to look around us in terms of what's coming out of pure research labs; what's happening in development in various high tech product companies; and what we see in key clients.

"We know that the things we're seeing around us will potentially be disruptive. We don't believe we can predict the future, but we know that things don't just pop out of the air. And it's been our realisation after working with Clayton [Christensen ] that most likely it will not be the individual products, the individual research, or the individual applications that have been built by companies that will be disruptive in the future, but some new combination of the things we see around us."