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"Disruptive innovation.": That is not an appealing name to me. "Disruption," like "eruption," like the Russian translation of Pussy Riot, "Vagina Eruption," that sounds terrible, like volcano eruption; like "ruptured," ruptured disk, ruptured hernia; like "disreputable." No! All negative, bad.
You know who it appealed to, though? Even the name, just the name "disruptive innovation" appealed to businesspeople. The Economist said it always had an appealing "bad ass" ring to it. I wonder if just the name had that appeal to businesspeople, or if to businessmen. Professor Lepore says guys would get up in front of meetings, conventions,--revivals, it sounds like--and shout DISRUPTION!!!!
Really, there is something about just the name that strikes a chord with business homos.
It is an aggressive name. DISRUPTION! Kick ass and take names. "I'm gonna disrupt your fucking brain function, man!" Kick chairs, throw chairs, pound tables, SHOCK AND AWE, BABY!
Americans like shock and awe.
I don't even like "innovation," it's too trite these days. I just got this month's Technology Review and in two of the blurbs on the index page to the articles "innovation" is used. Everybody is innovating or claims to be. At least innovation has a positive connotation, you think "innovation" and in your mind a picture of a light bulb appears. Like, "What a bright idea!" "What a pleasant surprise!" Pleasant, Progress, fresh, new, vaguely exciting. Innovation!
The concept is not even new. It is recycled from Joseph Schumpeter.
So the phrase is composed of two words, one almost always associated with negativity, the other almost always associated with the positive. An appealing discordance, I guess. It's a weird term to me.
But enough about the name. What is it?
In one iteration disruptive innovation is the little fish eating the big fish. Pause: The only other instance I know of of the little fish eating the big fish is Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution. End pause. A minnow starts biting off an unglamorous end of a market--like rebar, like compact cars--an end of the market that the big fish are too willing to cede it and the minnow becomes so good at it that it starts eating bigger and bigger fish until voila! Toyota practically disrupted Detroit out of business.
It is this version of the theory that, according to Professor Clayton Christensen, is the reason big companies fail. Really? Toyota eating Detroit's lunch is an example of disruption theory in action? Why isn't that just common market economics at work? One company starts out making a cheap and shitty product but gets better and better and gets more market share. I think Professor Christensen would say that's different, that's disruptive innovation, because Detroit ceded the compact car market to Toyota. Really?
Be that as it may, how do companies succeed according to the theory? Not the Toyotas, how do big companies keep from being eaten from below? How could U.S. Steel or Detroit have used disruption theory to succeed? By staying in rebar and compact cars according to Professor Christensen. That sounds right but that doesn't sound like anything other than classic market economics either. You don't need disruption theory to explain how lower prices and improving quality will succeed whether you're a minnow or a whale shark.
As flawed as the theory is as retrogressive analytical, i.e. historical, tool it achieves ontological certainty compared to its prescriptive ability. Christensen suggests that companies deliberately start disruptive sub-units. ? That doesn't sound right at all. Christensen's disruptive innovation mutual fund failed and was liquidated. Apple was to have failed, that was what that flawed historical record showed so clearly to the man who can see into the future. The creation by financial institutions of the subprime mortgage market was, as Christensen has said, a classic instance of the little fish biting off an unglamorous end of a market and disrupting the entire industry, capitalism itself and Western civilization!
Is then, if disruptive innovation really exists, is it always good? Is that happy-sounding word innovation always good? Yes, Professor Christensen has said, maybe not so good for those other things, society, capitalism, civilization as we know it, you, me, us but good for the financial services industry. Which it was not! But that's what the man said. Even when it is bad it is good, even when disruptive innovation doesn't work it works, even when I was wrong (about Apple) I was right. That is what the man said.
On this record why, in God's name, would the theory of disruptive innovation, so-named, appeal to anyone?
The theory so-named is the product of a mind formed by a religion founded in a period in the short history of one nation. Disruptive innovation is an only-in-America phenomenon.
