Don't Be Trapped By 'Disruption' Dogma

It is disheartening when an insightful, mind-expanding theory becomes innovation-chilling dogma. I fear that is happening to Clay Christensen’s illuminating observations on disruptive innovation.

I had my latest run in with this phenomenon recently while leading an innovation discussion with the management committee of a large global business.

As regular readers know, I believe that market leaders have assets that should allow them to out-innovate almost any startup and most new entrants. The key is to get out of their own way by thinking big, starting small and learning fast.

“Thinking big” is the critical first step. Effective innovation starts with systematic consideration of a wide range of possible futures. This covers the full gamut from starting with a clean sheet of paper to exploring doomsday scenarios where doing nothing about new developments might drive you out of business. You can’t innovate in ways you can’t imagine. You can’t defend against what you don’t foresee.

As the executives in my session were considering a particularly interesting idea, one participant raised what is becoming an all-too-common question:

Is that a disruptive innovation, or merely a sustaining one?

I’ve found there are two motivations for this question.

One motivation is constructive. The questioner is staying within the spirit of the discussion and asking, essentially, “Are we thinking big enough?” That is a worthwhile question.

The other, more common motivation is destructive. The questioner really means to say: “This idea does not fit into Clay Christensen’s disruptive innovation model—therefore it can’t work and should be discarded.”

The objector in my workshop was someone who adhered to Christensen’s strict definition that “disruptive innovation” is “a process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves up market, eventually displacing established competitors.”

For him, and too many others, this definition has become dogma. Purists view it as the only way to disrupt, or to be disrupted. Unless you are pursuing a “disruptive innovation” in this strict sense, this line of reasoning goes, you will fail. And, on the flip side, incumbents need not fear new entrants that are not following Christensen’s model.

Thus, “sustaining innovation” is not a compliment, when offered in this context. Christensen’s theory argues that sustaining innovations “eventually end up producing products or services that are actually too sophisticated, too expensive, and too complicated for many customers in their market.”

Clay Christensen exemplified this when he observed on the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 that the iPhone was “a sustaining technology relative to Nokia.” This led him to observe:

The prediction of [my] 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. History speaks pretty loudly on that, that the probability of success is going to be limited.

Some might argue that a prediction so far off the mark should have debunked the theory. History speaks pretty loudly on the iPhone's success. Also, the iPhone not only disrupted Nokia, the market leader, but the rest of the industry as well. In science, such abject mismatch with new empirical data usually sends theorists back to the drawing board.

Yet, debates continue about whether this or that company or product is consistent with the dogma of disruptive innovation—such as these recent analyses of Theranos, Ford, Uber and Tesla.

Unlike many, however, I don’t put effort into trying to tweak or refute Clay Christensen’s theory. I applaud his work to develop a rigorous, scientific theory of business innovation. I just don’t think he (or anyone else) is close to constructing one, yet. I’m also relatively indifferent to the heated debate that has raged between Jill Lapore and Clay Christensen, and their respective allies and acolytes.

I hold, instead, that Christensen’s theory is a useful but incomplete framework with which to expand and assess the consideration set of innovation options. The danger comes when it is used as a rationalization for premature closure or interpreted as the only route to success.

Think big. Think disruptively. But, remember Marvin Minsky’s adage:

You don’t really understand something if you only understand it one way.

Rather than being dogmatic about what qualifies as "disruptive innovation," strive for exploring options that fit the classical, more expansive definition of “disruptive”:

Above all, as Steve Jobs advised, “Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.”

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Chunka Mui is a business advisor and author of three books on strategy and innovation including, most recently, The New Killer Apps: How Large Companies Can Out-Innovate Start-Ups.  Follow him here at LinkedIn, and also at Forbes and Twitter.  This article is updated from one originally published at Forbes.