The Disruption Machine: What the gospel of innovation gets wrong (2014) | Hacker News Reader

The Disruption Machine: What the gospel of innovation gets wrong (2014)

newyorker.com

80 pointsalannallama14 comments

A great piece called "Disruption is not a strategy" by Jerry Neumann (http://reactionwheel.net/2016/05/disruption-is-not-a-strateg...) illustrates the difficulties of taking the lofty ideas from The Innovator's Dilemma and applying them to new companies. He also makes the observation that Christensen was writing for Fortune 500 CEOs who care about risk management, not upstart companies trying to find product-market fit.

I think it's most prudent to acknowledge disruption theory as one of many interconnected factors that influence the outcome of business ventures instead of an unshakable dogma with a dominating impact on all things.

Agree thats a great essay.

Christensens writing was almost mostly an analysis and never a "how to" although in innovators solution he did venture into that. But the most important book he wrote was the first one. That's at least how I read him.

Contrary to what many think about I.D. it was mostly a book about the failure of (good) management, rather than one of innovation. It was a book that tried to shed lights on how to avoid being disrupted rather than how to disrupt.

It's clear from his writing that you don't set out to disrupt industries. You make solutions for those industries that might end up disrupting them.

And so they should mostly be seen as historical and cautionary tales rather than as cookbooks for disruption. I think many people get this wrong about his writing.

I liked Innovator's Dilemma quite a bit. Most economic historians consider Christiansen's original study of disk drives in the 1980s a weak foundation for theorizing. Even so, there are useful insights like the tendency for companies to move up in established markets and hence miss emerging, initially lower-value markets. Anybody who has seen how sales works in a large enterprise will recognize this pattern.

That said it seems to me that Innovators Dilemma neglects an even simpler reason for company failure: many corporate bureaucracies simply aren't very responsive to external economic signals because career success is only distantly related to market success. This is one of the reasons that companies run by decisive, technically oriented founders often seem to do better than their more corporate peers. It's easier to turn the ship to deal with something like the Internet if the company is driven by somebody who feels the change in their gut.

p.s., Anybody else like the New Yorker writing style? The dismantling of university innovation was pretty funny.

Its not that the Innovators Dilemma neglects things, it was simply the first part of the work. Since Christensen is an academic, he has spent many years(Innovators Dilemma is 20 years old) refining his theories(and creating new ones) since the first book was published.

I really liked The Innovator's Dilemma, but it struck me that the application of it to situations could be post facto rationalization, because applying to new situations required classifying the aspects of the situation. Christensen seemed to find it diffuclt too, because he classified the most disruptive innovation of current times as non-disruptive (i.e. sustaining):

But Apple's just about to launch the iPhone.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. They've launched an innovation that the existing players in the industry are heavily motivated to beat: It's not [truly] disruptive. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2007-06-15/clayton-c...

So a disruptive technology is one that disrupts the marketplace, but markets are impossible to predict, so disruptive technologies can only be identified in hindsight. Have I got that right?

This is 100% correct, 50% of the time.

The iphone can be seen as a cheap portable computer as well as as a fancy phone. Viewed in that way, it fits the logic of the Innovator's Dilemma. It's also clear, I think, that the disruption to the computer industry was greater than the phone industry.

Not only is this an excellent essay -- it's one on my list of "I need to write a response / answer filling in some additional bits" pile -- but Jill Lepore is pretty much on fire with most of her writing and speaking.

I strongly recommend taking a look at her New Yorker contributor page, as well as seeking out what she's written elsewhere.

Her recent (April, 2017) talk at the University of Kansas on privacy also includes several interesting, and fairly novel, concepts, well worth considering:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=51G6eii4ZGk

older threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7901612

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9638683

Christensen's response, linked to in those threads:

http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-06-20/clayton-chri...

Innovator's Dilemma is way better thought-through than most business theories. If Clay is right, and the article author simply ignored most of what he's written in the last 30 years on the nuances of his theory, then her article is a (very eloquent) hatchet job.

Question: is there a canonical list (or a good set of lists) on what are considered to be disruptive innovations?

As I recall, Christensen's initial set were hydraulic earth-moving equipment (vs. steam shovels), disk drives, and ... I forget exactly. Possibly the Japanese auto industry starting from small engines (motorcycles, etc.), then cars (Honda). Possibly PCs, disrupting minis and mainframes?

My copy of the book seems to have gone walkabout.

TL;DR Business theory based on cherry-picked case studies, post hoc rationalization and survivorship bias fails to make a compelling case, but nobody cares, because it tells an appealing story.

Prior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9638683

Reply on news.ycombinator.com