| To reify this, my favorite example from The Innovator's Dilemma: After WWII hydraulic excavators were introduced to the market. They could only move a quarter of a cubic yard at a time, the sort of work that had previously been done by men with shovels. This nicely fit with the explosion of suburbs where these excavators could efficiently dig small trenches for water and sewer access. The steam shovel companies ignored this, catering to their markets for bigger trenches for main water and sewer pipes and larger scale excavation (e.g. digging out foundations). The companies making hydraulic excavators steadily improved, to the points where they could handle the above applications. At those points they quickly wiped out their entrenched steam shovel competitors, for they didn't have chains that could snap and lash back at the operator. For the general reasons mentioned by the parent posting, these competitors woke up to the threat way too late, didn't have the expertise necessary to quickly compete and I'm pretty sure most/all that tried ran out of money before they could make the transition. One of the deadly things about disruptive innovation is that they can crater your revenues faster than your corporate culture can respond. ADDED: All that said, after reading the article, while the author does not clearly make the case, I get the feeling that "Teen Knowledge Work" as enabled by the Internet is indeed something like a disruptive innovation. The Internet has massively leveraged would be and current "knowledge workers". Let's look at our ability to self-educate: previously, it was hard to be an autodidact if for no other reason than it was hard to find out the books you ought to read. Now that meta-information is easily available, in on-line course book lists, Amazon.com reviews, Wikipedia articles and of course many less formal venues. With these resources, not a whole lot of cash (and things like forums where one can questions) the self-directed self-disciplined learner can get a pretty good education. It won't equal the one you can get from rubbing shoulder with a few thousand of the best and brightest at MIT or an IIT, but I suspect it's enough to start a serious knowledge worker career. So to get back to the disruptive innovation concept, teens who previously (with rare exceptions) just couldn't come up to speed before they exited their teen/early 20s years, who were able to do lower quality "knowledge work", are now able to do much higher quality knowledge work. (One detail that you need to take into consideration of all this is how the college degree has replace the now worthless high school degree and now illegal recruiting testing. And now things like a portfolio of accomplishments presented on the Internet can replace the college degree as a signal.) |
You make an interesting point: as education has become more widely available, it's lost its quality as a signal because everyone goes there; and it does appear that quality has gone down (I guess it must, if you cater for everyone). Odd: it's usually the disruptions that go down-market, targeting non-consumption. One can see the net as an extension of this downward/expanding trend of education.
But I do think it's an extremely rare person - maybe just as rare as autodidacts of years past - who has the self-discipline/interest and wisdom to use these resources. It's not easy (in fact, my PhD supervisor liked to say that the purpose of a PhD was to enable you to learn how to learn - I wouldn't go that far, and indeed haven't completed). Most people look at videos of cats online - a sort of downmarket TV.
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BTW: If you're interested in reading Christensen's other books... they are co-authored, and he's also running a consulting business. And sadly it shows. His first book was beautifully written, forming a compelling and inspirational narrative (really), and rigorously supported by data. His later ones aren't. They are written like a cross between undigested research paper (but without data or support) and an overly casual self-help business book. I suppose it's too much to expect even of someone as brilliant as Christensen, a Rhodes Scholar, to do the equivalent of a PhD for each of his books (his first one was based on his PhD). They have interesting ideas, but they are complex and not supported, leaving me with the sense that they little more reliable than plausible ideas. Actually, they are pretty good, but just irritating, disappointing and confusing.
He's refined terminology for his theory (e.g. target non-consumption; asymmetrical motivation between poor entrants and rich incumbents) which I think is good. He also relates it back to the basics, of succeeding by meeting customer needs/wants, and generalizes. It's a bit insular, self-indulgent and inward looking, focusing on his theory instead of data in the world. Solipsistic, in a wordy word.