Trends of research and development in cement manufacture and application

Following the coinage in the mid-1990s of the term “disruptive innovation” by Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen, technologies are classified into two categories: “sustaining” and “disruptive.” Sustaining technologies are the ones that undergo successive improvements, often incremental in nature, pushed by cost as a driver, while disruptive technologies refer to innovations by which a product or a service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of the market and then relentlessly moves up the market, eventually displacing an established product or a process technology.