
Is the Theory of Disruption Wrong? - jweir
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-05/did-clay-christensen-get-disruption-wrong-
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notacoward
"Disruption" is an overused term, not an overused idea. True disruption,
following Christensen's model, must involve a higher barrier for incumbents
than just sprouting a new product line. If their expertise, infrastructure,
and/or market position allows them to do that, they will . . . and they will
probably win. Even most of Christensen's own examples fail to work the way
true disruption must.

True disruption does occur, when a fundamentally different and fundamentally
better way of doing something comes along, but it's a _lot_ rarer than people
suppose or pretend. It's barely more common than creating a whole new
industry. 99% of the time when people talk about disruption they really mean
nothing more than basic product/service differentiation.

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bgibson
_> True disruption does occur, when a fundamentally different and
fundamentally better way of doing something comes along,_

Fwiw, Clayton's definition of disruption is something _worse_ , not better,
but just good enough and much cheaper and more accessible than the incumbent
it disrupts. Initially it doesn't steal any customers from the incumbent,
rather it opens new markets and brings in new segments that couldn't afford
the incumbent, and only after that does it begin eating into the incumbent's
market share.

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kijin
Disruption is an ideal, not necessarily a fact about the status quo. It's an
ideal as old as David and Goliath, embodying the hope (against all odds) that
the underdog might one day overcome a much stronger competitor.

Most of the time, the underdog just gets squashed and we never hear about it.

Ideals are neither predictions nor diagnoses. They're something we need to
fight tooth and nail to achieve, not something we can take for granted. So
economists probably shouldn't tout disruption as such a major factor in the
success and failure of well-known companies, and entrepreneurs should likewise
stop assuming that it will happen as advertised.

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brrt
I think that is an unrealistically optimistic and friendly interpretation of
Christensens' position. I agree that the idealistic aspect of disruption
probably explains it's popularity (not to mention the opportunistic aspect).
But Christensen cum suis have been propagating disruption as a fact for nearly
twenty years, and it has had an enormous influence on the public debate.

And as usual with influential ideas, it's not actually true, and (I think) a
very reasonable amount scepticism would have demonstrated that much earlier.
As an academic, I really think the global community could have expected more
honesty from Christensen.

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notahacker
In fairness, I think the popularity of Christensen's terminology far exceeds
the acceptance of his theory. "Disrupt" has become a startup cliche widely
applied by people that haven't read his books to startups that don't fit the
pattern he purported to identify.

So social networks get described as "disruptive" even though the closest thing
to a _financial_ edge they have over competing distractions is not being under
any pressure whatsoever to make a profit. Tesla gets lazily labelled as
"disruptive" even though it's offering a high-priced, technically-superior
product to the incumbents and the CEO is actually on record saying he's not a
fan of Christensen's theory and he instead aims to grow businesses by
expanding technological possibilities.

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msravi
From the article:

> Their executives concentrate on complex, expensive products for the highest-
> end customer. That creates an opportunity for upstarts to come up with
> cheaper products or services that get them entry into a market via low-end
> customers.

The article mentions IBM, but doesn't go any deeper. But the description above
seems to fit the way IBM has been disrupted by Amazon-AWS to a T.

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bobosha
A related article

[http://chronicle.com/article/The-Undoing-of-
Disruption/23310...](http://chronicle.com/article/The-Undoing-of-
Disruption/233101?key=QD1yIFY4MSBAMX9naz5HMD8HaCNvMR5yYXMba3kiblpTGA%3D%3D)

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bko
I can't imagine there is anything scientific about this "study". Not sure how
it could "disprove" an idea of disruption.

> King, the Tuck professor, along with Baljir Baatartogtokh, a graduate
> student at the University of British Columbia, spent two years asking
> experts about each of the cases Christensen studied. In a third of the
> cases, old-guard businesses were not actually disrupted, the researchers
> found. The companies may have contended with innovation, but they were not
> pushed out of the market by it.

What passes as science these days is asking experts about what really happened
in specific cases and seeing if it agrees with Christensen narrative? That's
not very scientific.

To be fair, the theory of disruption is also a non-scientific (albeit useful)
narrative and having competing competing narratives is useful but just don't
try to mask it as science

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bru_
This clearly shows that we need to disrupt the old and outdated statistics
that are powering these studies. Disruption isn't a straight line and you
can't fit a straight line to disruption because it's a fractal.

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kozak
They are just disrupting the theory of disruption.

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shele
From the beginning the main practice of the theory of disruption was to make
some guys and gals feel special.

