All About Mentoring Spring 2011 - SUNY Empire State College

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Searching for Nonconsumers
In a follow-up book, The Innovator’s
Solution, Christensen and co-author Michael
Raynor investigate strategies to create and
sustain growth through disruption. Part
of the book revisits the key themes of the
earlier work, but the bulk of the book
proposes more ideas for generating success.
Among the more interesting discussions is
a section on the personal digital assistant
and smart phone markets, and the specific
challenges of a firm like Blackberry-maker
Research in Motion (2003: 1076). Since the
book was written before the introduction
of the iPhone, one can see how prescient
Christensen and Raynor were in assessing
the issues in the smart phone market.
The authors reiterate a point made in the
earlier book: disruptive approaches focus
on nonconsumers as a market niche. The
problem is that it can be hard to know who
isn’t using a product while one is actually
producing it or plans to produce it; we
learn what people need most times from
asking our existing customers rather than
surveying the universe of people who do not
use our product or service. Often, customers
are discovered by accident. Christensen
recounts the story of Honda management’s
efforts to develop a motorcycle meant to
compete with the classic highway-style
Harley-Davidson; in the midst of this work,
management discovered that the customers
wanted Hondas for off-road use, which
was an arena in which Harley was not
competing at all. This ensured Honda’s
success in the new market niche. In the
short run, profit margins for the disruptive
technologies are lower than they are for
sustaining technologies. In fact, there is an
inexorable pressure on business to move
“up-market” and produce higher profit
margin goods and services while happily
leaving the low end, low profit margin to
others. This is a great idea, that is, until
the disruptive producers take over and the
top end evaporates. Anyone old enough to
recall vacuum tube technologies in radio
and television, or gigantic DEC computers
with dumb terminals, or eight-track tapes,
can see that the introduction of disruptive
technologies is a real strategic threat.
The World of K-12 Education
In Christensen’s more recent work, he
and his co-authors have begun to apply
his research to pressing national policy
matters – health care and K-12 education.
In Disrupting Class, he addresses issues that
have arisen in the 1983 report, “A Nation
in Crisis,” the debates over “No Child
Left Behind,” and the controversy about
the value or appropriateness of charter
schools. They build on the work of Howard
Gardner’s “multiple intelligences” to write
about individualizing learning (not a new
idea at Empire State College), but they also
expand on ideas about nonconsumption.
Here, the authors focus on the use of online
learning not to supplement classroom
teaching but rather to provide teaching in
areas where courses would or could not be
offered. One example they use is teaching
Arabic online in public schools where no
district could afford an individual instructor
(Christensen, Horn, & Johnson, 2011, p.
2162-2171). They argue that high quality,
even student-developed, learning tools and
facilitated networks for sharing learning
tools might dislodge textbooks and massmarket
learning management systems and
offer individualized solutions for students
who learn differently (p. 2480-2495). In
fact, the authors argue, based on their
data analysis, these tools may acquire a
25 percent market share and the tide may
well have turned by 2014 in favor of digital
and/or online learning against traditional
classroom-based modes of teaching and
learning – that is, the current “sustainable”
educational technologies. Insofar as these
innovative, disruptive modes of teaching
and learning fill a need, even if they are not
immediately better or obviously superior,
they respond to a market for people who
do not now use or do not feel as if they
benefit from existing modes of teaching
and learning.
How have schools ended up in this
situation On one level, it is not a failure
of education or educators. Christensen and
his co-authors repeatedly argue that schools
and educators are consistently improving
at the variety of tasks asked of them – test
scores are often increasing, special education
students are being mainstreamed into regular
classrooms, and higher absolute numbers of
students are graduating from high school. It
is more the case that to continue to improve,
they must standardize and routinize how
to do their jobs so they can maximize the
opportunity for an education and the quality
of that education value for the maximum
number of students.
If education is a set of tasks to be measured
by external criteria like testing, graduation
numbers and mainstreaming data, it could
be described as successful. If education is a
tool to accomplish other life goals as defined
by students, like getting a better job, making
more money, having enough fun in school
so they do not mind being there as opposed
to playing sports or shopping, then is it
working Christensen and his co-authors
would argue no. Here is how the authors
describe it:
We believe that a core reason why so
many students languish unmotivated in
school or don’t come to class at all is that
education isn’t a job that they are trying
to do. Education is something they might
choose to hire to do the job – but it isn’t
the job. While we continue to do our
research to understand this crucial issue,
we hypothesize that there are two core jobs
that most students try to do every day: They
want to feel successful and make progress,
and they want to have fun with friends …
How do schools fare against … competitors
as something that students can hire to
be successful and have fun with friends
Miserably in many cases. (Christensen,
Horn, & Johnson, p. 2886-2903)
Disrupting Higher Education
What about the higher education arena
and Empire State College’s role in it If
Christensen and his co-authors are correct,
and high schools are being transformed
in the foreseeable future by the disruptive
innovations they describe and which I
note above (like online learning, studentdeveloped
learning tools and facilitated
learning networks), what might that
mean for Empire State College and its
competitor institutions that seek disruptive
solutions: ideas and processes that are new
to us. If they are correct that educators
are fundamentally misunderstanding why
students are “hiring” education in the first
place, what could that mean for students
who are “hiring” colleges and universities
suny empire state college • all about mentoring • issue 39 • spring 2011