Disruptive Innovation and Recent HBR IDEAS Podcast

 I've enjoyed Harvard Business Review for years (for decades) and I often hear one or another related HBR podcasts, Cold Calls or IdeaCast.  

IdeaCast #908 is "Disruption isn't the only path to innovation," based on a new book by INSEAD authors "Beyond Disruption." 

For the first time, an IdeaCast worth that energizes me to complain.   

The authors took the position that innovation is always disruptive or destructive innovation (e.g. Schumpeter, Christensen).   One should focus instead on white-space innovation, such as microfinance or SQUARE (epayment), creating new markets.

Well, of course.  Everyone knows that.   When Christensen wrote about disruptive innovation (see his 2015 retrospective artice at HBR here), his point was not that it was new, he had case studies, but the topic was paid too little attention.   (*)

But the point is that Schumpeter and Christensen felt that various kinds of destructive, replacing, disruptive innovation needed to be paid more attention to.   The INSEAD book turns this on its head, with a straw man argument that ALL people pay attention to and ALL people try to invent, is disruptive innovation.   This is completely out of sync with Christensen's claim to novelty and insight when his book Innovator's Dilemma was new.   

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Probably disruptive (destructive) and blue-sky innovation "that doesn't unemploy anybody" are actually on a sliding scale.   If I make 3" computer disks and bankrupt and displace an 8" disk manufacturer, that's one extreme.   (Exit Nokia; Exit Blackberry and Palm).   But if I sell $50 pet Halloween costumes, that's displacing something; people have $50 less to spend somewhere, but it's more diffuse.  There doesn't seem to be a place for this sliding scale in the INSEAD book, at least, based on the podcast.

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I guess I have a second pet peeve.  Christensen, brilliant man though he was, unfortunately locked down on the phrase "disruptive innovation" and wanted to police that this phrase mean exactly what he wanted it to mean  (a novel low-performing entrant's disruptive entrance at the down-side and rapid trajectory to the up-side) - see his 2015 retrospective.   To me, it was inappropriate or unlikely to claim this nuanced single purpose for the broad English phrase "disruptive innovation."    Fine to call it "Christensonian innovation," as in "One of the most important types of a disruptive innovation is a Christensonian innovation, as in the 8" and 3" disk drive industries.