
The Disruption Machine: What the gospel of innovation gets wrong (2014) - alannallama
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-disruption-machine
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wyc
A great piece called "Disruption is not a strategy" by Jerry Neumann
([http://reactionwheel.net/2016/05/disruption-is-not-a-
strateg...](http://reactionwheel.net/2016/05/disruption-is-not-a-
strategy.html)) illustrates the difficulties of taking the lofty ideas from
The Innovator's Dilemma and applying them to new companies. He also makes the
observation that Christensen was writing for Fortune 500 CEOs who care about
risk management, not upstart companies trying to find product-market fit.

I think it's most prudent to acknowledge disruption theory as one of many
interconnected factors that influence the outcome of business ventures instead
of an unshakable dogma with a dominating impact on all things.

~~~
ThomPete
Agree thats a great essay.

Christensens writing was almost mostly an analysis and never a "how to"
although in innovators solution he did venture into that. But the most
important book he wrote was the first one. That's at least how I read him.

Contrary to what many think about I.D. it was mostly a book about the failure
of (good) management, rather than one of innovation. It was a book that tried
to shed lights on how to avoid being disrupted rather than how to disrupt.

It's clear from his writing that you don't set out to disrupt industries. You
make solutions for those industries that might end up disrupting them.

And so they should mostly be seen as historical and cautionary tales rather
than as cookbooks for disruption. I think many people get this wrong about his
writing.

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hodgesrm
I liked Innovator's Dilemma quite a bit. Most economic historians consider
Christiansen's original study of disk drives in the 1980s a weak foundation
for theorizing. Even so, there are useful insights like the tendency for
companies to move up in established markets and hence miss emerging, initially
lower-value markets. Anybody who has seen how sales works in a large
enterprise will recognize this pattern.

That said it seems to me that Innovators Dilemma neglects an even simpler
reason for company failure: many corporate bureaucracies simply aren't very
responsive to external economic signals because career success is only
distantly related to market success. This is one of the reasons that companies
run by decisive, technically oriented founders often seem to do better than
their more corporate peers. It's easier to turn the ship to deal with
something like the Internet if the company is driven by somebody who feels the
change in their gut.

p.s., Anybody else like the New Yorker writing style? The dismantling of
university innovation was pretty funny.

~~~
Tinyforebrain
Its not that the Innovators Dilemma neglects things, it was simply the first
part of the work. Since Christensen is an academic, he has spent many
years(Innovators Dilemma is 20 years old) refining his theories(and creating
new ones) since the first book was published.

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hyperpallium
I really liked _The Innovator 's Dilemma_, but it struck me that the
application of it to situations could be post facto rationalization, because
applying to new situations required classifying the aspects of the situation.
Christensen seemed to find it diffuclt too, because he classified the most
disruptive innovation of current times as non-disruptive (i.e. sustaining):

 _But Apple 's just about to launch the iPhone.The iPhone is a sustaining
technology relative to Nokia. In other words, Apple is leaping ahead on the
sustaining curve [by building a better phone]. But the prediction of the
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._
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2007-06-15/clayton-c...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2007-06-15/clayton-
christensens-innovation-brainbusinessweek-business-news-stock-market-and-
financial-advice)

~~~
Pitarou
So a disruptive technology is one that disrupts the marketplace, but markets
are impossible to predict, so disruptive technologies can only be identified
in hindsight. Have I got that right?

~~~
joejerryronnie
This is 100% correct, 50% of the time.

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dredmorbius
Not only is this an excellent essay -- it's one on my list of "I need to write
a response / answer filling in some additional bits" pile -- but Jill Lepore
is pretty much on fire with most of her writing and speaking.

I strongly recommend taking a look at her _New Yorker_ contributor page, as
well as seeking out what she's written elsewhere.

Her recent (April, 2017) talk at the University of Kansas on privacy also
includes several interesting, and fairly novel, concepts, well worth
considering:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=51G6eii4ZGk](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=51G6eii4ZGk)

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petra
older threads:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7901612](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7901612)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9638683](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9638683)

~~~
IsaacL
Christensen's response, linked to in those threads:

[http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-06-20/clayton-
chri...](http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-06-20/clayton-christensen-
responds-to-new-yorker-takedown-of-disruptive-innovation)

Innovator's Dilemma is way better thought-through than most business theories.
If Clay is right, and the article author simply ignored most of what he's
written in the last 30 years on the nuances of his theory, then her article is
a (very eloquent) hatchet job.

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dredmorbius
Question: is there a canonical list (or a good set of lists) on what are
considered to be disruptive innovations?

As I recall, Christensen's initial set were hydraulic earth-moving equipment
(vs. steam shovels), disk drives, and ... I forget exactly. Possibly the
Japanese auto industry starting from small engines (motorcycles, etc.), then
cars (Honda). Possibly PCs, disrupting minis and mainframes?

My copy of the book seems to have gone walkabout.

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Pitarou
TL;DR Business theory based on cherry-picked case studies, post hoc
rationalization and survivorship bias fails to make a compelling case, but
nobody cares, because it tells an appealing story.

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kuharich
Prior discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9638683](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9638683)

