Meeting the Challenge of Disruptive Change

Assigned by Thompson for his Media & Culture module.

Bibliographic Deets

 * Christensen, Clayton & Overdorf, Michael. "Meeting the Challenge of Disruptive Change" Harvard Business Review. March-April 2000.

Overview

 * Big business has a hard time keeping up with radical change. Why? Because big businesses are built on incremental growth and are meant to be resistant to short, dramatic changes. But corporations still need to keep competitive, so by creating niche, avant-garde groups outside of direct company control they can play both the sustaining game and experiment with the "next big thing"

Content

 * "One of the dilemmas of management iss that processes, by their very nature, are set up so that employees perform tasks in consistent way, time after time. They are meant not to change" hence the problem. (68)


 * Need for high margins of profit & growth make experimenting on new technologies undesirable among bigger companies with more to lose than gain (69)


 * "SUSTAINING TECHNOLOGIES are innovations that make a product or service platform better in ways that customers in the mainstream market already value" (72)


 * "DISRUPTING INNOVATIONS create an entirely new market through the introduction of a new kind of product or service, one that's actually worse initially, as judged by the performance metrics that mainstream customers value." (72)


 * "Spin out an independent organization from the existing organization and develop within it the new processes and values required to solve the new problem" (73)


 * "The primary requirement is that the project not be forced to compete for resources with projects in the mainstream organization" (74)