Qatar- Harvard professor does not own 'disruption'

(MENAFN- The Peninsula) By Justin Fox

Does Clayton Christensen own the word “disrupt”? The Harvard Business School professor certainly behaves as if he has a proprietary interest. This is from a new Harvard Business Review article co-authored with Deloitte consultant Michael E Raynor and HBS professor Rory McDonald that has made a few headlines during the past week: Uber is clearly transforming the taxi business in the United States. But is it disrupting the taxi business?

Well here’s the Merriam-Webster definition of “disrupt”: to cause (something) to be unable to continue in the normal way: to interrupt the normal progress or activity of something.

Uber has indisputably interrupted the normal activity of the taxi business and is likely rendering it unable to continue in the normal way. According to standard English usage then it is disrupting the taxi business. Christensen Raynor and McDonald though have other ideas:

According to the theory the answer is no. Uber’s financial and strategic achievements do not qualify the company as genuinely disruptive — although the company is almost always described that way.

By their taxonomy an innovation is only disruptive if it starts in a “low-end foothold” serving less-demanding customers or a “new-market foothold” which enables it to “turn non-consumers into consumers.” They continue: Uber has gone in exactly the opposite direction: building a position in the mainstream market first and subsequently appealing to historically overlooked segments.

OK fine Uber doesn’t fit the very specific model of innovation that Christensen outlined first in his 1995 HBR article with Joseph L Bower then in his 1997 book “The Innovator’s Dilemma” then in his 2003 book with Raynor “The Innovator’s Solution” and in subsequent writings.

Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation was one of several attempts by business-school scholars in the 1990s to explain “why established companies like Polaroid or DEC struggled to adapt to technological change despite ample resources talented engineers and admired leaders.” He doesn’t mention that McKinsey consultant Dick Foster addressed the same question in his 1986 book “Innovation: The Attacker’s Advantage.”

What distinguished Christensen’s contribution from the others was I think (I haven’t read all the research that Sull cites so I don’t want to try to sound too authoritative) the elegantly methodical way in which he described how low-end technological innovations crept upstream and the powerful phrase he chose to describe the process: “disruptive innovation.” As McKinsey’s Foster told me once with regard to his own word choices: “I will forever rue the day I didn’t call it ‘disruption.’”

Now though Christensen seems to be regretting that he did call it disruption. There are lots of economic theories with names that are less expansive and less interesting than the phenomena they describe. “Efficiency wage” and “principal-agent model” are two that immediately spring to mind. The very power of “disruptive innovation” on the other hand leads people to use it in situations that don’t fit Christensen’s limited model of innovation and change.

They’re not necessarily wrong to do so. In a now-infamous 2007 interview with Jena McGregor in Businessweek Christensen had this to say about Apple’s iPhone which had just been introduced:

The iPhone is a sustaining technology relative to Nokia. In other words Apple is leaping ahead on the sustaining curve by building a better phone. But the prediction of the theory would be that Apple won’t succeed with the iPhone.

Actually the iPhone combined a lot of existing elements to create a product that was completely new. The early purchasers all already had mobile phones and computers — they weren’t “non-consumers” — but they didn’t have anything quite like the iPhone and soon put it to all sorts of uses that I think we should be allowed to call disruptive.

Christensen’s desire to root out perceived misuses of the term disruption was clearly heightened last year by a takedown piece in the New Yorker magazine by Harvard historian Jill Lepore.

But the word was around long before Clay Christensen. It’s a pretty good word too even though it surely gets overused these days. In any case it isn’t up to one business school professor to decide how it is used. Innovation just doesn’t work that way.

Bloomberg