Comments on: Organizing to Disrupt

By: tubelite

tubelite — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 05:34:27 +0000

While listening to your most important customers is certainly a good way to do sustaining innovation, I’m a little skeptical that you can get much by way of disruptive innovation by listening to the most important needs of your non-customers. (I understand what you mean by disruptive – not necessarily technologically innovative)

Since a disruptive innovation yields handsome benefits to the disruptor, you’d think every market player would be rounding up the usual suspects and grilling them under bright lights until they confessed to their biggest unmet requirements. However, disruptive innovation often lags the availability of the requisite technology by years. This, I suspect, is because no matter how obvious and technologically trivial they appear in retrospect, it’s pretty hard to get these game-changing ideas in the first place. Least of all from customers who’re usually using your product as an ancillary to meet their main business objectives.

Are there a statistically significant examples of customer oracles who drove disruptive innovation?

On a bit of a tangent, here’s Steve Yegge on the Fine Art of Building Shit That Nobody Wants.

By: Ed Chi

Ed Chi — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 19:02:03 +0000

Nice set of thoughts! I particular like how you integrated several ideas from different places together, and that in order to disrupt, you have to organize to do it. This gives me some thought as to what are combustible moments in research history where the stars align and disruptive innovation gets out of the door into the real world.

By: What tomorrow’s Managers need to learn | Grabbing Lightning

What tomorrow’s Managers need to learn | Grabbing Lightning — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 12:51:05 +0000

[...] take advantage of what we’re learning out there? The evidence is mounting, as my new friend Venkat can tell you even if he does think our book is “tedious”!!!! Innovation needs to be [...]

By: Venkat

Venkat — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 19:32:43 +0000

Gina:

Thanks for your comments. It would be interesting to hear your view of the gap between the way the R&D “silo” function is currently typically organized, and a more modern “innovation” function that is cross-enterprise and includes venture/green field activities. I am sure most orgs are on a capability maturity path there. At Xerox, our umbrella org is called the “Xerox Innovation Group” but I’d say it is only about halfway between old-school R&D and ideal innovation models.

Frank: Glad my piece ranks up there in your broad survey . I hope to stay up there with future pieces on this theme. I just rebranded this blog with ‘disruption’ in the tag line, so I plan to focus more on this theme…

Venkat

By: Gina O'Connor

Gina O'Connor — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 15:09:26 +0000

Great review. Not sure I like the ‘tedium’ issue associated with our book, but if that’s what it takes to get the word across. Our main point is that innovation has to become a function in companies, just as marketing has over the past 50 years. To do that, we have to consider all elements of a management system…not just processes…not just senior leaders’ role, and not just the org structure. Thanks for the mention.

By: Frank Hecker

Frank Hecker — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 14:20:54 +0000

I run a regular Google search for articles related to Christensen and innovation, and this is one of the best I’ve turned up. I think this is a great guide to thinking about the general problems around “organizing to disrupt”.