Design Thinking at Work by David Dunne

Author:David Dunne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ADD SUBJECT
Publisher: University of Toronto Press

The Tension of Disruption, Reframed

Could the Tension of Disruption be reframed and companies disrupt themselves? The question goes to the heart of Clayton Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation.

I mentioned earlier that many organizations didn’t seem to accept Christensen’s ideas, and in any case, the theory itself has come under fire. Writing in the New Yorker in 2014, Jill Lepore offered a thoughtful and scathing critique of Christensen’s theory of disruption.16 Some academics weighed in too.17 Part of the concern was that since Christensen’s cases were selected on the basis of market performance, the theory wasn’t much use when it came to predicting what would be disruptive and what would not.

I found that some design thinkers were reframing the Tension of Disruption by creating two types of platform: technological and collaborative.

We met Brandon Riddell of Canadian Tire in chapter 3. One of his key goals, you’ll recall from my interview with him, was to show the rest of the organization what new, cutting-edge ideas the lab could come up with.

Great, I thought. So if “cutting-edge ideas” were disruptive innovation, just what was he working on? “Christmas lights,” he told me. “Mmm … cool,” I said a little hesitantly, wondering exactly what could be cutting edge about Christmas lights. But, Riddell continued, these were not just any Christmas lights: in trade jargon, these were IoT (Internet of Things) Christmas lights that you could control from your office, your car, or wherever.

I was still a bit disappointed. Cutting-edge Christmas lights didn’t have quite the same cachet as Spock’s tricorder. Riddell went on. “We built out our platform on the back end that will support any … connected device. Then we’ve made decisions on the type of chipsets, and then we’re passing this information down to all the different business units and saying, ‘This is how you approach your vendor. This is the type of information that you can give them if they want to integrate with us.’”

In other words, the Christmas lights were not just a single-shot technology. Riddell’s group was using Christmas lights to develop the specs for all IoT innovations as a platform for future products. He was using an incremental innovation to lay the foundation for future innovations – disrupting at a more fundamental level.

“If we have this infrastructure in the back end that we’ve built out to support it,” he continued, “then building one more connected device is … you know, we do a prototype in a week, versus before it would take us months to do it. What we’ve done is taken a step back, built out what we need, so that we can move faster in the future.”

Now that was cool.

In short, Canadian Tire was using technological platforms to bridge incremental and disruptive innovation: “[Canadian Tire is] building technology to actually extend the digital infrastructure. They do that by building proof of concepts and then minimum viable products that ultimately will hopefully become real products out in the real world,” said Communitech’s Craig Haney.

Pfizer had a similar

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