Many pundits and leaders in the U.S. government hope to use the model of successful military innovation to stimulate innovation for green technologies – notwithstanding criticisms that defense technologies are often expensive and esoteric and sometimes fail to meet optimistic performance...

This article improves Clayton Christensen's widely cited theory of innovation and applies it to explain recent developments in the U.S. defense industry. We clarify Christensen's categorization of innovations, and expand the theory's scope to products with multiple quality attributes and markets...