Some potentially disruptive innovations (DI) will either not survive long enough or will not sustain their momentum sufficiently to eventually become disruptive. What value can we then extract from these occurrences to better understand how to sustain a potential DI? Conversely how does this phenomenon contribute to our knowledge of dealing with threats of disruptive innovation?

This paper advances the concept of disrupted disruptions and reveals the surrounding elements and traits that can make an innovation with a disruptive promise to loose such potential. It also gives us understanding of how an innovation may lose such capacity due to the characteristics of the innovation itself or the responding actions of the industry/company being disrupted. The paper further present four propositions based on which a model was then developed to conceptualize the characteristics and response attributes that characterize disrupted disruptions.