There’s a new concept in the IT landscape, that of disruptive innovation. Apparently not your everyday cereal-box variety of innovation, disruptive innovation begets another enigmatically named beast — disruptive technology. I should have seen this coming.

Here’s the dust jacket summary: Disruptive innovation happens when companies get too wrapped up in their own vision, creating a so-called ‘chink’ in the fabric between what they think customers want and what the customers actually desire. This chink is an opportunity for a new player to introduce some sort of stop-gap solution. Think open-source Linux in contrast to the closed world of Microsoft. Think blogs/RSS in contrast to the traditionally exclusive publishing community. The disruption part is that some upstart punk new to the block is releasing an easy to adopt product that takes away market-share from the big guys’ bottom line.

The big guys will tell you that disruptive innovation is a bad thing for everyone - that these technologies are ill conceived and poorly designed. Forbes magazine called them “stealth attacks” which start initially as low-quality, low-margin products that most customers can’t use. But because of they are characteristically easy to adopt, they can quickly evolve into something truly competitive and transforming.

There’s nothing more disappointing to me than hearing former technology pioneers telling us that innovation is a bad thing. That means they’ve become so preoccupied by their bottom line that they no longer enjoy progress for progress’ sake. This sluggish momentum and self defeating narrow-mindedness has become emblematic of this industry. I applaud disruptive innovators for continuing to think outside of the box, a mantra that’s been otherwise discarded by their peers. It was disruptive innovation that made the transistor and the integrated circuit (that and a bit of alien technology from Area 51!) It was disruptive thinking that put a PC in the homes of almost every family living above the poverty line. It was disruptive innovation that transformed the mass storage industry, and it is disruptive thinking that will break technologists out of this new complacency and into the next revolution.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 25th, 2004 at 7:54 pm by Philip Loring and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.