Theory and Practice of Innovation
Theme
What is the nature of disruptive innovation? How does it help explain how companies succeed or fail in the technological age? What is the specific disruptive innovation process used at AT&T?
Overview
Recall that last week, Mike Felix asked you asked you each of you to develop two questions about the issue of addressing the issue of creativity in education. You were to create these on your own, not in Moodle. This week he uses these two questions to take you through the process he uses to diffuse innovation throughout AT&T.
The theoretical foundations for what he will do appears below.
Christensen and Disruptive Innovation
Michael Christensen is synonamous with the concept of "disruptive innovation," a perspective of innovation that is universally recognized as being very helpful in explaining how and why some technologies are adopted by society, and others are not.
Wikipedia opens its entry on disruptive innovation with the following description. Note how it is contrasted with "sustaining innovation," which extends and sustains a particular technology but does not displace it:
"A disruptive innovation is an innovation that helps create a new market and value network, and eventually goes on to disrupt an existing market and value network (over a few years or decades), displacing an earlier technology. The term is used in business and technology literature to describe innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically first by designing for a different set of consumers in a new market and later by lowering prices in the existing market.
"In contrast to disruptive innovation, a sustaining innovation does not create new markets or value networks but rather only evolves existing ones with better value, allowing the firms within to compete against each other's sustaining improvements. Sustaining innovations may be either "discontinuous"[1] (i.e. "transformational" or "revolutionary") or "continuous" (i.e. "evolutionary")."
Read/View
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The Innovator's DNA. Throughout this course you have been reading this book, which is co-authored by Christensen. It captures disruptive innovation in very practical terms. This week it becomes part of the basis of our conversation, along with his lectures, identified below.
If you want to develop an understanding of how Christensen arrived at his theory of disruptive innovation, I recommend The Innovator's Dilemma. He looks at a number of case studies that led to the mathematical model he developed to show how disruptive innovation works.
Also read:
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Broken Windows - The police and neighborhood safety, by Kelling and Wilson, in the Atlantic, 3/1/82.
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Broken Windows Theory by Willson and Kelling. This is the Wikipedia article.
View
Along with finishing The Innovator's DNA, you need to watch at least one of the following lectures by Christensen, in whch he explains his concept of disruptive innovation very well:
I recommend you also also watch this lecture of Christensen's. It covers similar territory as the first lecture, but fills in some gaps:
Read and/or scan the Wikipedia article. Also, I recommend you read the Wikipedia overview of disruptive innovation. At least scan it. It provides a substantive overview of the theory.
Moodle Discussion
How can you use AT&T's disruptive innovation process in your own professional practice?
How does Christensen's perspective modify (change, lessen, strengthen) your idea of innovation?
Other optional material for this week
Disruptive Innovation vs. Harvard: Who Will Win? by Jose Ferreira
Clayton Christensen: Still disruptive, The Economist, 6/13/13
Thinking Fast and Slow, chaps 7 and 9, by Kahneman (2011). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
The role of cognition in innovation (Mumford, Hunter & Byrne)
The cognitive building blocks of innovation and the innovation cycle (Nightingale)