Clayton Christensen: Still disruptive
AFTER several years of rotten health, Clayton Christensen crossed the Atlantic this week to give a series of lectures at Oxford, the university in which he was a Master’s student some 36 years ago. The topic was the continued relevance of "disruptive innovation", a term he coined in 1997 with his influential book the "The Innovator’s Dilemma". After the lecture, the Harvard professor answered some of our questions.
You have not had an easy time of it over the last few yearsNo. I had a horrible heart attack and still have symptoms of that sometimes. Then cancer, which is in remission. But the stroke is the hardest thing because I just lost my ability to speak and to write. So I have had to relearn that literally one word at a time, and sometimes I use the wrong word or can't find words. But overall I feel very blessedIt is incredibly brave to start lecturing againMy wife comes most of the times I teach and stands on the front row to help me. She's been wonderfully supportiveIn your lecture you suggested that firms are too beholden to data. How does that view fit with the age of big data?It is truly scary to me. By definition, big data cannot yield complicated descriptions of causality. Especially in healthcare. Almost all of our diseases occur in the intersections of systems in the body. For example, there is a drug that is marketed by Elan BioNeurology called TYSABRI. It was developed for MS [multiple sclerosis]. It turns out that of the people who have MS a proportion respond magnificently to TYSABRI. And others don't. So what do you conclude from this? Is it just a mediocre drug? No. It is that there is one disease but it manifests itself in different ways. How does big data figure out what is the core of what is going on?You have written much about how technology will disrupt higher educationTwo thing are salient. Firstly, the technology per se is not disruptive or sustaining. Rather it is the way it is deployed in the market. So if all that Harvard did was provide MOOCs to everyone so they could employ the technology in existing business models, it wouldn’t change much. But where it would make huge difference is on the delivery of education amongst a population that can't come to Harvard Business School. And those are people who are working, or who have kids, and they can't drop it all to get a traditional education. So firms have started corporate universities, and rather than saying you need to take this course for a semester and you have to learn what we say you need to know, corporate universities call Harvard up and say: “We need to teach strategy in a week. It needs to be customised to the, say, chicken industry. And it needs to start on this day and finish on this day.” And that's a very different delivery of content. So MOOCs will be important when we are using that to replace learning from a teacher to learning on the job. But these will be a one to one replacement of a real teacher.But the real excitement comes in the upper level courses of undergraduate programmes and the second year of MBAs and the like. I think they will be served by networks rather than by MOOCs. On the network is, say, Clay Christensen’s little tutorial on a particular subject. And you have another tutorial on something else. So the content is developed by users and teachers. So if I need to develop strategy for a week in the chicken industry, I just take this and that and slice them together and that is going to be the dominant model. The MOOCs will just be entry level courses.....MORE
HT: Farnam Street who pointed out the highlighted bit.
Previously on Professor Christensen:
