There’s a lot of commotion over disruption
I accidentally caused much controversy when I posed a question in several LinkedIn groups. Of course, my ramblings always gather excessive attention (caution, sarcasm in play!), but this one went overboard.
What did I do? I asked: “Who will create the next disruptive technologies that will change the world?” and pointed to this article’s premise that non-experts are better at disruption.
While I certainly have my thoughts on this subject, I wanted to hear the voices of others.
There was a lot of discussion, so I want to share some more interesting opinions.
As expected, one group stated that you need to be an expert to develop promising new ideas, and another said that being a novice is best since experts are myopic to a fault.
A third camp said that novices and experts need to collaborate to ideate disruptive technologies and follow through on how to implement them. Although no one knew at the time, this is my own belief.
Various commenters did seem to agree that defining when to call an innovation “disruptive” is difficult because of the variations in:
• Speed of adoption (influenced by pricing, usefulness, and marketing).
• Difficulty in quantifying “significant” in terms of market adoption, users, technologies replaced, dollars sold or profitability.
• Labeling. Technologies are declared by their creator(s) to be “disruptive” before they have been introduced into the market.
This causes misunderstanding since disruptive technologies can only be assessed after they penetrate their market).
There were many insightful comments. Here* are a few that were short and sweet:
• Truly disruptive innovations do not occur often. – Ken Smith, Innovation Excellence Group.
• Who is an expert, and who is a non-expert? Should they be called “specialists” instead? [paraphrased] – Didier Mauroy, Emerging Technology Group.
• Can “new” disruptive technologies be considered as new when most new technologies are merely assemblies of already known technologies? – Walter Paget, Innovation Excellence Group.
• Maybe a preferred form for the original question would ask whether the innovator would be a dreamer or a realist rather than an expert or non-expert. – David Wittenberg, Innovation Excellence Group.
• “Think outside the box” is a euphemism for “question authority.” – Paul Teich, MiniTrends.
• Referring to the Innovator’s Dilemma that Clayton Christensen wrote about, “one of the biggest inhibitors of innovation is success.” – Wayne Caswell, MiniTrends.
• Radical/revolutionary innovation is close to disruptive and may be confused with it. – Steen Koldsø, Innovation Excellence Group.
• You can’t be an expert in something that doesn’t yet exist, so all disruptive innovations per se will come from nonexperts in the new field by definition. – Chris Yapp, The Futurist Group.
• [The] best sign to know if your innovation is disruptive, might be the fact that your own scientific community will be shocked and will try to stop it’s experimentation. – Eric Offenstadt, Innovation Excellence.
• So what gets in the way of the new great “disruptive” technologies? Bureaucracy, politics, fear of missing out, jealousy (even hate), poor communication, etc. – Walter Paget, Innovation Excellence Group.
* All comments appeared in LinkedIn groups cited.
Lita Ford’s picture credit: Granpas Hyena (Wikimedia)
Dreams are necessary, some times it is out of the box thinking this thought can be transformed to realistic with the help of experts…….
This is a great discussion. Disruption may come from our senses, intuition, thinking and feeling. We need some tension to disrupt and I believe the tension is “best” at the intersection of these four “blocks”. Likewise, I tend to think of my response Dreamers on one extreme and Realists on the other extreme. Likewise Experts versus Novices. We need all to overlap to learn and adapt.
I would dare say that the same individual need to act as the four in one. Kekulé was inspired by a dream of seeing a snake biting its tale to elucidate the benzene structure. The Dreamer in the Scientist!