The Genesis of the Glock Pistol: How Gaston Glock Created the Dominant Design for Handguns

This study investigates how the Glock pistol emerged as the dominant design in modern handguns, despite its inventor's lack of prior experience in firearms design. It shows that Gaston Glock resolved a longstanding usability contradiction with the pistol he invented: combining the firepower and rapid reload capability of semi-automatic pistols with the safety and operational simplicity of double-action revolvers. Through a detailed reconstruction of the development process, the paper demonstrates how Glock applied a user-centered, solution-neutral approach, used iterative prototyping, and strategically leveraged functional integration and emerging manufacturing technologies. The resulting design was lighter, more reliable, simpler, and more cost-effective than its contemporaries. Drawing on these findings, the paper proposes a novel model for physical product evolution, in which innovation is driven by the gap between user-required and product-delivered usability. The model emphasizes the central role of the conceptual design and depicts the interaction of relevant entities in the innovation process. The Glock case illustrates how disruptive innovations can emerge from user-focused, iterative design – and offers a transferable framework for understanding dominant design emergence in engineering contexts.