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The investment of private money in technological innovation is driven by the expectation of successful market penetration. This decision to invest is less risky when the innovation represents gradual improvement of existing technologies. The term disruptive innovation is used to describe the opposite case, i.e. innovations that are so different that their establishment in the market causes a disruption to the pre-existing system. The existing literature on disruptive innovations provides us with historic case studies of successful market capture by new technologies, but this in itself is insufficient to clarify the chances of success for nascent technologies. This paper sets out to bring greater clarity to the characteristics of disruptive innovation in a way that informs the debate on the viability of emerging technologies. Whilst existing definitions are based on technologies that were successful, this paper proposes a three part …