PMI Q3 IMMERSIVE

“The disruption for Henry Ford wasn’t the invention of the car, it was the assembly line, the mass production. His disruption was making cars for every man.”

Once disruption begins, the potential for more disruption is exponential; technology continues to evolve infinitely by expanding upon new findings.

Rideshare companies swiftly replaced expensive cab and limo services with cheaper, easy-to-use app interfaces that connect directly to your credit card.

Remote phone conferencing has existed for a long time, but video conferencing technology took over the industry by understanding customers’ demands better than any of its competitors.

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Innovation is coming up with an idea, but disruption is implementing that idea until it’s made an impact.

The download on disruption: What is disruption and why does it matter?

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What does it take to disrupt? While many assume that disruptive innovators must be born geniuses, Copeland believes that anyone with curiosity and drive can come up with an idea that causes disruption. “It’s never too late to have that type of intuitive mindset,” he says. “That’s where genius resides. Genius is not based on intellect, it’s all about creativity, curiosity, and wonder.” A lack of money or resources shouldn’t prevent anyone from becoming a disruptor, he says. “In today’s society, unfortunately, money is the driver for so much, everyone is chasing money,” he says. “But there are plenty of things – penicillin, incubators, radio, TV – that weren’t motivated by money at all. Steve Wozniak used parts he had lying around his garage to invent the personal computer.” Copeland suggests that if every adult tapped into the wonder that came to them naturally as children, the brand of creativity and curiosity needed for disruption would be easier to access. “To anyone who wants to be a disruptor, I say, ‘look back toward when you were between the ages of one and 10. Be playful, be imaginative, go explore.’”

“To anyone who wants to be a disruptor,” Copeland says, “look back toward when you were between the ages of one and 10. Be playful, be imaginative, go explore.”

The father of disruptive innovation Brunner and other experts credit Clayton Christensen, PhD, a Harvard Business School professor, for coining the term “disruptive innovation” in the 1990s and identifying technology as its main driver. Christensen considered disruption positive for humankind because it makes products and services affordable and available to larger groups of people. Christensen died in 2020, but his theories continue to guide business leaders and economic advisors on the principles he wrote about in his articles and books, including the seminal, “The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms To Fail,” published in 1997 by Harvard Business School Press. In 2007, Harvard created the Christensen Institute think tank in his name. Its purpose is to continue developing Christensen’s heralded Theory of Disruptive Innovation and use it to tackle societal challenges. According to its website, the Institute is “redefining the way policymakers, community leaders, and innovators address the problems of our day by distilling and promoting the transformational power of disruptive innovation.” Today the principles Christensen created and honed are being applied around the world in fields including health care, education, and economic prosperity.

The COVID disruption Brunner notes that his appointment as chief disruption officer came before the pandemic. But he cites COVID-19 as the force that created the need for someone to manage its disruption across many organizations, and “no place more than the field of education.” Going forward, he says, leaders should embrace the COVID lesson that education can be, and should be, personalized for every student. “People should learn in a way that’s tailored for them, and technology can play a very big role in that,” he says, noting that this became obvious during the pandemic when students at all levels made a rapid shift to online learning. “It’s easier at the college level, but ideally it would start at Pre-K. Education is super critical. We have to give opportunities to people so they can learn new skills.” During the pandemic, people and organizations had no choice but to pivot so they could continue operating. Restaurants created outdoor dining spaces. Office workers brought laptops home and shifted to remote working. Grocery stores rearranged space so customers were able to be socially distant. Retail stores upped their online shopping options and offered curbside pickup. Brunner says that COVID “opened people’s eyes to all kinds of things.” “It brought us to this new normal where we are learning positive lessons from the pandemic,” he says. “Take civil discourse, how could we do it better? How about the CDC? If there’s another pandemic, could they do better when it comes to communication?” Craig Copeland agrees that the pandemic created opportunity that hadn’t been there before. He points to gene-splicing methods that enabled the vaccines because their research was funded by the government, not private companies. “The cool thing was that it was the first time since the hydrogen bomb that so many scientists from different backgrounds collaborated together,” he says.

Prudent companies recognize that disruption is happening constantly all around them and learn to anticipate its effects on their specific product.

Business disruption has been around for centuries, but the advent, and the dizzying spiral, of technology has ramped it up considerably. Thanks to tech, people have been able to come up with and implement ideas that previous generations could not have imagined. Established businesses know this, and some have even formed departments tasked with anticipating and strategizing to manage the impact of disruption. And it’s not only businesses that are reacting to the rapid revolution of disruption. Robert Brunner, PhD, was teaching astrophysics before he was tapped in 2017 by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to become the school’s associate dean for innovation and the chief disruption officer at the Gies College of Business. Brunner says that people often converge the concepts of innovation and disruption as if they are the same thing. But innovation is coming up with an idea, and disruption is implementing that idea until it’s made an impact. “Innovation is simple,” Brunner says. “It means you’re doing things in a new way, that’s all. Disruption is way bigger. When you disrupt it means you’re making a potentially large and possibly unforeseen impact that could affect large groups of people.” Although business leaders are aware that disruption is always a possibility, they’re often not likely to get out ahead of it. “It’s so easy for people to stop paying attention,” he says. “You watch the tide come in every day, you know it’s coming, but maybe you don’t notice it. It’s the same thing with disruption. People are aware that it’s happening, but I’m not sure they see the magnitude, or how it will affect them.”

Disruption leads to sublime advancements for humankind in the medicine and epidemiology fields.

Anticipating disruption Companies that withstand and embrace disruption also know how to anticipate it, according to Daniel Burrus, an author and corporate disruptive innovation consultant. “What keeps all CEOs awake at night is the disruption they can’t see,” Burrus says. “They’re not worried about the competition; they’re worried about their product or service. But if they learn to anticipate what’s coming from the competition, they can become positive disruptors too.” He cites Blackberry as an example of a company that didn’t anticipate the effect disruptive innovation would have on its business. When the iPhone came out, the CEO of Blackberry dismissed it, saying that no one would want to watch videos on a small screen. As the head of a large, successful company, he could have put resources toward disrupting his own product by changing its screens. But he stayed loyal to the Blackberry operating system, and the company ultimately failed to keep up. Two years before Amazon launched the first online bookstore, Burrus spoke to a group of booksellers and warned them of the digital revolution that was coming for their business. “In my speech I told them that in the next few years, they would see a highly disruptive virtual bookstore,” he says. “How did I know that would happen? Because the trends in technology had made it possible. When it comes to technology, if it can be done, it will be done. Amazon started in a garage. I told the booksellers, any of you can do this. But they didn’t. So they became the disrupted."

“Innovation is simple. It means you’re doing things in a new way, that’s all. Disruption is way bigger. When you disrupt it means you’re making a potentially large and possibly unforeseen impact that could affect large groups of people.”

When cars were first invented, he points out, only wealthy people could afford them. “The disruption for Henry Ford wasn’t the invention of the car,” Copeland says. “It was the assembly line, the mass production. His disruption was making cars for every man.” The result was a host of new possibilities, he says. With cars of their own to drive, people were able to explore different careers since they were able to travel longer distances to get to work. Industries were born, and jobs were created, due to the newly-created need for roads, tires, gasoline, and so on. Very early innovators set the stage for air travel long before the Wright Brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk in 1903. “There were other versions of their idea first,” Copeland says, citing an ambitious inventor who tried taking flight a century before the Wright Brothers did by attaching wings made of feathers to his arms. “The problem was that a man can’t flap his arms that hard, so he crashed,” he says. “But it set the tone, the idea, the wonderment, that led to man being able to fly.”

The car was once only accessible to the affluent, but once its production was innovated by the assembly line, it became available to a wider demographic.

Disruption leads to more disruption Examples of business disruption are legion and affect virtually every industry. Moreover, they never seem to stop happening. Take transportation. It’s not just ride shares that disrupted the industry. The automobile disrupted the horse-and-buggy. Subways disrupted buses and trolleys. Airlines disrupted railroads. Now electricity is disrupting gasoline-fueled cars, and self-driven cars may soon disrupt driver-driven electric. Communications disruptions have multiplied with technology. Radio disrupted books and newspapers, television disrupted radio, cable TV disrupted network TV. Video stores disrupted movie theaters, movies-by-mail disrupted video stores, and then streaming services disrupted it all. The list goes on. Fast food restaurants disrupted the dining industry. Digital imaging disrupted film. Vacation rental apps disrupted the hotel business, and a whole lot of other things. Craig Copeland, disruptive theorist and author of the book “Disruptors: The Gateway to Genius-Level Thinking,” says that companies must stay innovative as well as competitive to survive, and that making products everyone can own is crucial to success.

What do you think of when you think of disruption? For most people, disruption is a bad thing. Unruly children disrupt class. Construction projects disrupt traffic. Thunderstorms disrupt baseball games. And so on. A disruption, by traditional definition at least, is an interruption in the way we expect things to go. But there’s another kind of disruption that’s happened since the wheel was invented, and that’s disruption in the business world. Largely considered a good thing, business disruption happens when something new comes along that impacts the status quo by turning a business or an industry on its head. It takes something that already exists and replaces it with something that’s more accessible and affordable to a greater number of people. Not too long ago, for example, people who lived outside urban centers had to arrange in advance, and usually pay top dollar, to hire a car and driver when they were unable to get themselves where they needed to be. But the taxicab, car service, and limousine industries were disrupted when innovators came up with the idea for ride-share services, and created the apps and the infrastructure to make tapping your phone to hire a ride on demand a commonplace convenience. Disruptive businesses challenge existing industries. They offer a new technology, product, or service that’s better than what’s already out there. Usually the innovation is more convenient, less expensive, and more user-friendly than its predecessor. It’s a new approach to what’s probably an old and outdated solution.

The download on disruption:

Remote phone conferencing has existed for a long time, but video conferencing technology took over the industry by understanding customers’ demands better than any of its competitors.

Anticipating disruption Companies that withstand and embrace disruption also know how to anticipate it, according to Daniel Burrus, an author and corporate disruptive innovation consultant. “What keeps all CEOs awake at night is the disruption they can’t see,” Burrus says. “They’re not worried about the competition; they’re worried about their product or service. But if they learn to anticipate what’s coming from the competition, they can become positive disruptors too.” He cites Blackberry as an example of a company that didn’t anticipate the effect disruptive innovation would have on its business. When the iPhone came out, the CEO of Blackberry dismissed it, saying that no one would want to watch videos on a small screen. As the head of a large, successful company, he could have put resources toward disrupting his own product by changing its screens. But he stayed loyal to the Blackberry operating system, and the company ultimately failed. Two years before Amazon launched the first online bookstore, Burrus spoke to a group of booksellers and warned them of the digital revolution that was coming for their business. “In my speech I told them that in the next few years, they would see a highly disruptive virtual bookstore,” he says. “How did I know that would happen? Because the trends in technology had made it possible. When it comes to technology, if it can be done, it will be done. Amazon started in a garage. I told the booksellers, any of you can do this. But they didn’t. So they became the disrupted."

“The disruption for Henry Ford wasn’t the invention of the car, it was the assembly line, the mass production. His disruption was making cars for every man.”

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