Disruptive Change Revisited: It’s Much Rarer Than We Think
It didn’t take long after last month’s introduction of the Apple iPad for the D-word to resurface. Was this slick new Tablet device disruptive to a) laptop computers, b) newspapers and media, and/or c) printed books? Such questions tend to follow any major new IT industry development. How many times have you asked whether this or that event or technology was disruptive to your business? But what did you really mean when you said it?
Our industry tends to use disruptive in two very different ways. From an etymological perspective, the word disrupt stems from the Latin rumpere, meaning to break, so that disrupt means literally to break in two. But the everyday usage of disrupt is more along the lines of forcing the normal course of events into disorder – for example, disrupting a meeting. From this perspective, any technology or event that marks a break away from a traditional method of doing business or creates significant market confusion might fairly be said to be disruptive in nature. Think about the iPod, iPhone, cloud computing, Software-as-a-Service, social networks, Twitter, etc.
But such has been the influence of Clayton Christensen, and his 1997 book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, that ‘disruptive technology’ has taken on a narrower and yet more potent meaning. According to Christensen, truly disruptive technologies are those that are difficult or even impossible for established market leaders to co-opt, and thus are inevitably led by new firms. In contrast, Christensen uses the term sustaining technologies to describe innovations that, however powerful, do not fundamentally threaten the positions and business models of established market leaders. For example, Christensen describes how the personal computer was disruptive to the minicomputer business, hence the rapid disappearance of Digital, Prime, Wang, Data General, etc. Yet an equally revolutionary technology, the CD-ROM, proved sustaining for the vinyl record companies, which adjusted and prospered – until the iPod.
Thus, depending upon whether one uses disruptive in the everyday or Christensen sense, disruptive change is either very common or very rare, and this inevitably creates confusion. Worse still, many of us, especially those in the media, routinely use phrases like ‘disruptive change’ and ‘disruptive technology’ in the everyday sense, but expect or indirectly imply Christensen-like market effects, leading to hype, exaggerations and misunderstandings.
At the LEF, and for business purposes in general, we think it is better to use ‘disruptive technology’ in the narrower Christensen manner. When we do this, we see that this sort of market changing disruption is actually quite rare outside of the IT industry itself. This is especially true for the Internet, which despite all of its extraordinary capabilities and influence is almost always sustaining in nature.
