Disruption. It may be the most overused—and misused—word in today’s business lexicon. (Grist.org’s report last year on “disruptive” mayonnaise says it all.)
The term also generates great passion. Steve Jobs said he was “deeply influenced” by the book that introduced the concept to the world: Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma. Another prominent fan, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, requires his top executives to read the book.
Then there are the detractors. Jill Lepore, a Harvard history professor, wrote a powerful takedown of disruption theory in the New Yorker last year, calling Christensen’s sources “dubious” and his logic “questionable.”
And this year Andrew King, a professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, and Baljir Baatartogtokh, a graduate student at the University of British Columbia, put the theory through their own stress test and found it lacking. Their article, published inMIT Sloan Management Review, concluded that the idea had little predictive power and cautioned managers not to rely on such a “simple” theory. In turn, several scholars have rallied to Christensen’s defense.
We hope to bring clarity to the debate this month. In “What Is Disruptive Innovation?”, Christensen and two coauthors revisit the theory—20 years after its introduction. They acknowledge that “disruption” is now applied to seemingly every business innovation—often imprecisely. (Even Uber, they argue, doesn’t fit proper disruption theory.) They define exactly what disruptive innovation is—and what it isn’t—and draw on two decades’ worth of experience to update the theory in ways we hope will be useful for our readers.