Disruption Theory

By now, many have indeed grown impervious to claims of disruption. The meteoric rise of the word in the cultural lexicon feels, in a way, analogous to the technologies it aims to describe (Google Books, 2016). But as the term was co-opted by marketers everywhere, its essence was lost in the scramble. In the 1997 book The Innvator’s Dilemma, author Clayton Christensen presents a compelling case for drawing a distinction between disruptive and sustaining innovations. 

Use of the word "Disruption" over time

Google Ngram Viewer (Google Books, 2016)

Christensen illustrates that disruptive innovations are fundamentally different because they are not simply innovations that make a product better than anything else in the market, but rather are characterized by having been rejected by the mainstream in their infancy only to find adoption in new, niche markets where they are able to grow unchecked by the major industry players that will later be disrupted (Christensen, 1997). Sustaining innovations, on the other hand, can be illustrated by the television industry. The first TVs were black and white, then a sustaining innovation came along in the form of color TVs, HD, and now 3D (Gurtner and Reinhardt, 2013). These new innovations, while hailed at the time as “game-changing” were easily adopted by most of the incumbents in the industry and relatively little displacement occurred.

Disruptive vs Sustaining Innovations (Christensen, 1997)

In contrast, an example of truly disruptive innovation is the mobile phone. The mobile phone was initially very expensive and offered worse sound quality compared to its tethered counterpart. However, mobile phones, as the name implies, were portable. This fact was at first ignored, but ultimately the mobile phone grew to be a truly disruptive technology (Christensen, 1997). Furthermore, the article Differences between early adopters of disruptive and sustaining innovations summarizes this theory by saying,

“a disruption is more likely when mainstream customers in an established market reject innovations that initially underperform in the most important performance dimension (Gurtner and Reinhardt, 2013).”

All of this adds up to a paradox. Existing businesses often ignore disruptive innovations because they do not serve any immediate business value nor are their features being sought by the businesses core customers. The size of incumbent firms also means that the small markets that end up incubating disruptive innovations are unattractive. 

"Disruption works because it is much easier to beat competitors when they are motivated to flee rather than fight (Christensen, 2011)."

This is one of the few times where human-centered design needs to questioned and, if applied, done so vary carefully. A human-centered approach to innovation within a company could lead to the gathering of information on the needs of the current customers, but as we have seen, this is precisely the mechanism for companies fall victim to disruption.

Human-Centered Disruption

While Christensen’s book looks heavily at the market identifiers of disruptive technologies, it is important for experience designers to look at technology emergence from a human-centered perspective. To start, one can look at the groups that drive disruption by adopting disruptive innovations. In 1962, Everett Rogers published Diffusion of Innovations which has been an academic mainstay since its inception. This book claims that Innovators and Early Adopters (as opposed to Early Majority, Late Majority, and Laggards) have unique character traits. These groups of people tend to have high knowledge of a product category, a higher social status and are more social (Rogers, 1995).

Diffusion of Innovation Graph (Rogers, 1962)

Geoffrey Moore expanded on Roger's work later in his publication Crossing the Chasm. Moore explained that there is something fundamentally different between the Early Adopter and the rest of those represented by the technology adoption curve. This difference is represented by "chasm" which businesses need to cross to keep growing. This chasm is the barrier that prevents many innovations from making it out of their core userbase to the mass market (Moore, 1998).

The Chasm (Moore, 1998)

The design luminary, Donald Norman, futher expounded on Moore's idea of the chasm by reconcilling it with a graph of how technologies come to meet human needs. Norman's graph is an attempt to look at Christensen's "innovators dilemma" in the context of design while also incoporating the chasm. What results is a diagram that helps to visualize not only how a technology comes to be disruptive but also why. Norman also helps to bring things back to a human-centered aproach by saying, 

"I often describe the difference by stating that for early adopters, the technological promise suffices. For late adopters, human-centered design is essential, for these people don't want promises, they want easy to understand, effective, enjoyable products (Norman, 1998)."

(Norman, 1998)

Early adopters display characteristics that might remind some of the “mavens” of Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point (Gladwell, 2006). But that is not where the story ends. Again, the study conducted by Gurtner and Reinhardt provides some interesting findings. The aim of the study was to examine if there were differences between early adopters of sustaining innovations versus early adopters of disruptive innovations. The results of the study turns up two significant findings. Firstly, adopters of disruptive innovations tend to be more knowledgable of the product category and also seem to be driven by information consumption, learning, and exploring. On the other hand, adopters of sustaining innovations are more involved with a given product category. They are attached to the technologies that have preceded the current one and are enthusiastic about the new models on the horizon (Gurtner and Reinhardt, 2013). To experience designers, these insights may prove useful in conducting research about the emerging technologies of the time. If the goal is to identify which technologies are potentially disruptive so as to better chart the course of a current business, then experience designers are uniquely adept at uncovering the nuanced perceptions of users about a given product or idea. The process of separating disruptive innovations from sustaining ones should begin with the feelings and perceptions of the users.

Creating Disruption

Knowing what disruption is and isn’t and being able to decipher between the two is valuable information to anyone working in business, but the billion dollar question is, “how do you create disruption?” In The Innovator’s Solution, the follow-up to The Innovator’s Dilemma, the authors suggest that a distinct team be tasked with collecting disruptive innovation ideas and bringing them to life (Christensen and Raynor, 2003). This suggestion is made based on evidence that larger companies and teams are less effective in innovating due to factors based on resources, speed, and culture (Hogg, 2011). It should also be noted at this point that disruptive innovations is a term that applies to a number of different innovation categories which include: technologies, business models, and product innovations (Markides, 2006). While Christensen and Raynor’s strategies for fostering disruption apply more specifically to technological innovation, Markides suggests that disruptive business models are different in that they do not always overtake a market completely and can live along side the business models of incumbent firms. Additionally, disruptive product innovations come about primarily from the scaling of niche market and incumbent firms would do well to play venture capitalist to the disruptor’s startup (Markides, 2006).  Building on this research was a study published in the journal Technovation. This study looked at disruption and the processes that drive it in a number of companies in China. The aim of the study was to draw some insights into what types of approaches were effective in stimulating disruption. A number of different approaches were examined, namely industrializing the R&D process, parallel processing in R&D, modularizing product development, and employing pragmatic decision making in the R&D process. The overall conclusion is that innovating on the process of research and development may be the most efficient way to create disruptive innovations (Wan et al., 2015). This is an interesting point to be made, especially with respect to the field of design. This study looks at the creation of disruption as a process, or put a different way, as a service being provided by a number members of an organization to the company at large. Innovating on this service begins to lead one down a path towards service design where a number of unique tools and skill sets come into play. Those particular skills and processes are central to the role of experience design (Stickdorn and Schneider, 2012). When looking at the findings of the literature in this way, it could be posited that when a company is trying to foster the creation of disruptive technological innovations an effective course of action is too look at the creation of those innovations as a service in which people, culture, systems, and processes all play a role and then to innovate on that service much in the way service designers or experience designers in general would.

Intrapreneurship

This being the case, what are companies doing and how are they doing it? Recently, a term has begun to pop up in conversations and articles about innovation: intrapreneur. An intrapreneur is

“an entrepreneur acting within an existing organization who assumes active responsibility for generating all types of innovation and particularly for introducing new products, processes and services in order to enable the company to grow and obtain profits” (Camelo-Ordaz et al., 2011). 

The growth of people who are defined by this label leads us to believe that companies are increasing their vigilance and trying to stay ahead of disruption (PAAR, 2015). However, by putting this idea of intrapreneurship in the the context of todays world of rapidly proliferating technologies it can be reasoned that effective intrapreneurs need to be aware of as many technologies as possible and understand their potential implications. Additionally, looking at academic literature on the subject of intrapreneurship turns up some interesting findings about the characteristics that make a good intrapreneur. In the article The intrapreneur and innovation in creative firms it is found that effectiveness in innovation from within a business is negatively correlated with age and length of tenure. More interestingly, and more relevant is that the study found that creative background positively affects the outcomes of innovation initiatives and business background hinders it (Camelo-Ordaz et al., 2011). These findings support the idea that designers are well suited to helping companies imagine the implications of future technologies and to subsequently helping them design strategies to react. This has not always been the case. While effective intrapreneurs have most certainly always been creative, they are not always explicitly designers or from creative backgrounds.