Before we use the ‘innovation’ label, let’s remember the man who coined the term
GHO Sydney’s Hamish Stewart remembers Clayton Christensen, scholar of disruptive innovation, and considers what he would think of our current obsession with the term.
I was sorry to read of the death of Clayton Christensen last month. If the name isn’t familiar, many of the concepts he wrote about will be. His first and most famous book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, from 1997, showed how incumbents get disrupted by new entrants with ‘good enough’ products. Cut to Apple introducing the iPhone a few years later, and sales of digital cameras plummeting: disruptive innovation, right there.
Since then the words ‘disruption’ and ‘innovation’ have become buzzwords of the highest order. Uber buzzwords, if you like – in business and marketing, at least. However, I can’t help but feel that in the rush for organisations to claim the innovation mantle, many of Christensen’s original points have been lost.
