News Feature

Interview: Clayton Christensen on Disruption

By Edward Prewitt

April 01, 2001 — CIO —

In recent years, Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen has gained a reputation for his work on "disruptive innovations"--products or systems that create entirely new markets. His first book, The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Harvard Business School Press, 1997), was named the best business book of 1997 by The Financial Times and Booz, Allen & Hamilton, and remains a stalwart in CIO’s Reading Room (www.cio.com/books). Christensen’s research explains why established companies--even those competently managed by smart people--have such trouble countering or embracing disruptive innovations that are on the horizon. His theory is that organizations customarily develop mind-sets and processes that revolve around doing what they already know. Once that pattern becomes established, managers have great difficulty justifying to others or even themselves the need to turn their processes upside down to respond to a barely emergent market change. By the time the threat is apparent, however, it’s usually too late; upstart companies have seized a substantial lead.

So how can CIOs recognize disruptive innovations and rally the company to take action? Christensen sat in his office recently with Senior Editor Edward Prewitt to talk about his research, its applicability to IT and a forthcoming book to be published by Harvard Business School Press. Soft-spoken and very tall (6 feet, 8 inches), Christensen, 49, better fits the mold of the established blue-chipper than the hungry upstart. After winning a Rhodes scholarship and graduating with honors from Harvard Business School in 1979, he served as assistant to two U.S. secretaries of Transportation before cofounding Chartley, Mass.-based Ceramics Process Systems, a high-tech materials manufacturer. Christensen returned to the B-school in the early 1990s and has since won numerous awards for his books and papers. His latest endeavor is Woburn, Mass.-based Innosight (www.innosight.com), a management e-learning website that seeks to disrupt printed magazines and journals--such as CIO. But his remarks reveal that there’s hope for us, and you, in the face of disruptive innovations.

CIO: why have cios embraced your ideas about the nature of disruptive innovations?
Christensen: I have a little vignette in The Innovator’s Dilemma about how people were trying to fly in the Middle Ages by fabricating wings, strapping them onto their arms, jumping and flapping real hard. For centuries subsequent innovators framed the problem as: The guys who died just didn’t flap hard enough. Yet it still never worked. Once they understood that there were some basic laws of nature that they needed to account for, once Bernoulli understood fluid mechanics well enough to articulate his principle, then there was a law of nature we could actually harness. I think that to some degree prior to my research, a lot of good managers were flapping their wings. They were working very hard to fight some fundamental laws of organization nature.

When you speak to people in it about disruptive innovations, do they look relieved or do they look frightened and anxious?
More frightened and anxious. One of the scariest things is it’s not yet clear that knowing disruption is happening to you may not make a big difference.