Issues aren’t always clearly black and white. When there’s disagreement about an issue, sometimes both sides can have merit despite their opposing viewpoints. It depends on the situation or on the purpose for which something is used. This is the case for the definition of disruptive innovation. Uber, the company that competes with taxi services, is often viewed as a disruptive innovation, although according to the strictest definition of disruptive innovation, it is not.
So, it’s good to see Harvard Business Review doing such a great job disseminating varied viewpoints about the definition of disruptive innovation. Harvard Business Review published the January 7, 2016 article “We Need to Expand the Definition of Disruptive Innovation” by Robin Chase, co-founder of Zip Car, and it published “How Big Data is Changing Disruptive Innovation” by Maxwell Wessel of Sapphire Ventures, on January 27, 2016. Both of those articles advocate definitions of disruptive innovation that are broader than the definition used by “The Innovator’s Dilemma” author Clayton M. Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor who developed and popularized the concept of disruptive innovation.
Clarifying misconceptions about disruptive innovation, Christensen, along with some colleagues, authored the December, 2015 Harvard Business Review article “What Is Disruptive Innovation? Twenty Years after the Introduction of the Theory, We Revisit What It Does–and Doesn’t–Explain“. He clarified that companies should not abandon still profitable businesses merely because of the threat of disruption. And, he clarified the definition of disruptive innovation, sticking with his viewport that a company like Uber, because it did not start out in a cheaper or less attractive sector of the market for taxi services, is not disruptive innovation. In contrast, the two articles mentioned above–one by Robin Chase and the other by Maxwell Wessel–take the position that Uber can be considered disruptive innovation.
I discussed the definition of disruptive innovation in my blog post at the end of November. There, I explained that I saw Christensen’s more restrictive definition of disruptive innovation as reflecting an academic and more theoretical perspective. I saw the viewpoint that Christensen rejects, the one that thinks of Uber is a disruptive innovation, as using a more practical definition of disruptive innovation. Although either perspective has merit, my November blog post pointed out that, since academic theory is valuable when it can be applied, there can be an advantage to using the more practical definition that treats Uber as disruptive innovation.
That’s why it’s encouraging to see that Harvard Business Review, not all that long after publishing Christensen’s clarification article, is also publishing articles that advocate treating Uber as disruptive innovation. It’s interesting that both of those articles supporting the broader–and as I see it more practical–definition of disruptive innovation were written by authors from the practitioner side, not from academia. I think Harvard Business Review does a good job for its readers by giving them the academic perspective in Christensen’s clarification article, and following it up not long afterward with articles that advocate the more practical definition of disruptive innovation.
