A Few Thoughts On Disruption, Innovation
There has been a lot of renewed interest in so-called disruptive innovation sparked by a recent article by Jill Lepore, a professor of American history at Harvard, who declared war on the term. In her article in the New Yorker she attacked the research and thinking behind the “The Innovator’s Dilemma”, the 1997 book by Clayton Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor, that originally popularized the idea of disruptive innovation. At the heart of the debate, Lepore is attacking the assumption that “disruptive” is inherently positive. In return, Mr Christensen fired back calling her article “a criminal act of dishonesty.”
What it is, or isn’t, isn’t really that important. It’s a lot like teenage sex: Everyone talks about it, few actually do.
One problem is simple overuse: as Kevin Roose writes, “disruptive innovation” has been adopted and championed to egregious excess by the modern management class, particularly in Silicon Valley.
As someone who works extensively in the area of innovation, I thought I’d take a stab at defining what it means to me.
Disruption is simply the change in the status quo and is mostly separate from the act and or process of “innovation.” That said, innovation may have the result of creating a market disruption, but it’s not the same thing.
Innovation, on the other hand is simply something new. It’s a new way of doing or thinking about something.
Disruptive Innovation: Something new, which changes the status quo.
The primary problem with most disruptive innovation theories today is they focus on attempting to create new market opportunities and value when it’s probably much easier to just destroy a market and it’s associated value. Open Source is pretty good example, for every story of success, there are 10 stories of how it killed an entire market segment. Remember paying for Web Servers, IaaS platforms, web browsers? Or even what Android has done to Blackberry or Nokia. But yet in the destruction comes massive opportunities. Think of all the amazing things we can do because we don’t have pay for Web Server software?
For me, disruptive innovation is not a technological challenge, it’s mostly economic. Therefore attempting to just build a better mouse-trap (be it the method, process or physical object) is the wrong way to look at solving this problem. I think it starts with looking at whether there is a fundamentally different way to understand the needs of a particular market.
That starts with asking, What if…
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