Clayton Christensen’s conclusion that small markets don’t solve the growth needs of big companies was best captured in his bestselling classic The Innovator’s Dilemma, which gave us many insights on why big companies with far more resources than market entrants, often fail to embrace disruptive innovations until it’s too late.

Furthermore, Christensen argued that competent employees have been trained to know what’s good for the company and how to build a successful career within a company. This is directly tied to company growth targets and employee incentives, both of which are evaluated on an annual basis at most listed companies and large private companies.

I recently argued that short-termism plagues the modern company and that companies can learn a lot from the German national football team who were given the mandate to develop something truly special over a period of ten long years, culminating with their success at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil.

More and more companies that were once small and built their reputation on disruptive innovations, are now big, have large value growth targets, are watched like hawks by the business media and report to shareholders who usually demand short-term returns on investment.

They have become victims of their own success.

This also explains why many once innovative companies, like Apple, have turned to high profile acquisitions to bolster their growth strategies.

The trickle down effect of these pressures on company executives ultimately results in decisions being made that align to the short-term growth needs of companies. The only way to achieve these short-term growth needs?

By focusing on sustaining existing markets as opposed to disruptive ones.

Consider the diffusion of innovation theory, popularized by Everett Rogers. The theory states that innovations spread through social channels over time. Innovators first embrace a disruptive technology and are followed by early adopters, the early majority, the late majority and finally, the laggards.

Essentially, what this implies is that the early market for disruptive innovations is generally quite small (the innovators number just 2.5% of the eventual market) and thus, does not solve the growth needs of large companies who may require, say $500m in revenue growth, to satisfy a 10% revenue growth target.

Furthermore, Geoffrey Moore, author of Crossing The Chasm, suggests that for disruptive innovations there is a gap, or ‘chasm’, between the first two adopter groups and the early majority. This further draws out the time required to realize a return on investment on disruptive innovations.

As such, executives charged with making resource allocation decisions are forced to focus on the near term wins which are usually fueled by existing paying customers, who already represent ‘the majority’, and whose business models are driven by existing technologies rather than disruptive ones.

For example, if I’m in the business of selling LCD displays to Apple who then use the displays in the sale of 9 million iPhones in one year, it makes more sense to make small innovations to what Christensen calls ‘sustaining technology’ and appease the existing market than it does, say, to focus on a disruptive type of screen that our customer, in this case Apple, would have no immediate need or desire for.

To best illustrate this point, I have compared the time in years it took for some of the most disruptive innovations and companies of the last sixty years to go from development to mainstream success.

* I have defined mainstream success as widespread consumer or industry adoption for innovations such as the pocket calculator and minicomputer respectively and net profits above $500m for the companies listed. Essentially, I define mainstream success as the market penetration required to interest or satisfy the growth needs of a large, profitable, listed company or private company that is an industry leader.

When compared with the one year employee incentive lifecycle at most listed companies and large private companies, it’s not difficult to see why large companies, who have the resource capacity, generally don’t invest in disruptive innovations. When they do, projects are often shelved because the return on investment is not delivered quickly enough to satisfy revenue targets.

Add to this the fact that millennials, who will make up 75% of the workforce by 2025, expect to stay in one job no longer than three years, and it’s easy to foresee innovation going the way of the dodo in large established companies.