All About Mentoring Spring 2011 - SUNY Empire State College

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Innovation, Disruption and Higher Education:
Is There a Road Map for the Future
Christopher Whann, Metropolitan Center
A Review of:
Christensen, C. (1997). The innovator’s
dilemma: When new technologies cause
great firms to fail. Boston: Harvard
Business School Press.
Christensen, C., & Raynor, R. (2003).
The innovator’s solution: Creating and
sustaining successful growth. Boston:
Harvard Business School Press.
Christensen, C., Horn, M., & Johnson,
C. (2011). Disrupting class: How
disruptive innovation will change the
way the world learns. New York:
McGraw-Hill. 1
Christensen, C., Horn, M., Caldera, L., &
Soares, L. (2011, February). Disrupting
college: How disruptive innovation
can deliver quality and affordability
to postsecondary education. Retrieved
from http://www.innosight.org
Innovation is one of the most exciting
topics in contemporary academic
business research. One can easily
lose track of the number of articles and
conference papers about innovation,
managing innovation, marketing innovation
and innovation strategies. If anyone can be
considered the leader of this field, Clayton
Christensen of the Harvard Business School
is certainly among the top candidates.
Christensen’s 1997 book, The Innovator’s
Dilemma, is a fascinating exposition of
how what he describes as “disruptive
technologies” can overtake an industry,
and how good management is no guarantee
of success in the face of massive change.
In The Innovator’s Solution, Christensen
follows up on this theme by discussing
how firms and managers can sustain an
advantage in an organization. Christensen
and his co-authors turn their sights on K-12
education in Disrupting Class, in order to
analyze how their findings from industrial
(often high-tech) settings might apply to the
controversies surrounding an educational
system often described as in crisis. In
February 2011, he and his co-authors
released Disrupting College, a report on
innovation in university education.
My goals in this essay are to outline some
of Christensen’s key arguments in the larger
discussion of innovation, and in doing so,
to summarize some of his central themes.
Within such a context, my hope is that
we can start developing some ideas about
how his insights might affect adult and
distance higher education, which we would
all agree is an area known for its claims
for innovation. I do not pretend that this
essay provides an exhaustive review of
Christensen’s work, but his insights do offer
us some guidance and some warnings about
how we might respond to future challenges
and opportunities.
In effect, I think that Empire State
College, as a networked institution with a
significant global and online presence, is an
interesting case study of how an innovating
organization may have become a “sustaining
organization” and thus susceptible to
being overtaken in a changing, competitive
environment even with good or wellintentioned
leadership.
Differences in Degree and
Differences in Kind
Christensen has noted that he has spent
decades in the halls of Silicon Valley
businesses. He has met many excellent
leaders and managers whose companies
have gone out of business. In The
Innovator’s Dilemma, Christensen describes
the trajectories of firms producing disk
drives, earth moving equipment, steel,
computer printers and motorcycles, among
others. He categorizes the technologies
upon which these areas depend as either
“sustaining” or “disruptive.” Technology,
in the sense Christensen and his colleagues
use it, basically refers to new products or
processes that improve speed, efficiency
or capability. Sustaining technologies are
those that introduce differences of degree
into a product or a process, so existing
users can use the product or process better.
Technologies that shave costs so products
are more affordable or technologies that are
markedly faster or more powerful are thus
sustaining. On the other hand, disruptive
technologies are those that introduce
differences of kind, so new users can take
advantage of the product or process. Over
time, disruptive technologies can themselves
become sustaining technologies, once they
have been thoroughly and widely adopted.
At their point of origin, Sony’s Walkman, or
Nokia’s cell phone or Amazon’s Kindle, are
examples of disruptive technologies.
Using certain criteria, disruptive technologies
are not necessarily as “good” as sustaining
ones. Thus, for example, the Walkman
was never as good as a high quality stereo
system, but users could take it outside when
they went for a walk (hence the name). An
early Nokia cell phone would drop calls
much more often than a Bell Telephone
landline, but we were no longer attached
to the wall or required to stay within 20
feet of a base while we used it. The Kindle
may not be as good as a beautifully bound
hardcover book, but it is much lighter than
carrying three or four books on the plane
during an extended trip. In fact, one could
argue that they are likely to be worse quality
technologies, but they often fill a niche
that consumers want or need and are more
affordable than sustaining ones.
While companies have an incentive to
keep producing a better product for the
customers and users they know they have,
it is successful producers of disruptive
technologies that can identify new
consumers who may not need the best
technology but need something “good
enough” for a different purpose. Many
traditional telephone-producing companies
could make much better phones than
before, and indeed they did, but they
suny empire state college • all about mentoring • issue 39 • spring 2011