Disruptive Innovation
When a large incumbent company has a product, they tend to target the product to a large mainstream group of consumers. With sustaining innovation, as that market saturates, companies innovate to attract the “pickier” customers, and offer more and more technological features in order to sustain their market share (Monday, 2009). Disruptive innovation is when a company brings a product to a saturated marked that is “simple, accessible, convenient, and affordable” (Harvard Business Review, 2008). Rather than going after the same markets as the incumbent, that product targets individuals or groups who are non-consumers, either by obliterating barriers to consumption or by finding an unsatisfied job to be done (Harvard Business Review, 2008). Christensen explains the disruptive innovation as figuring out “how to break a trade-off by giving more of one without requiring us to accept less of the other” (Horn, Staker, & Christensen, 2015, p.xviii). As the innovator has a different business model than the incumbent, they are able to offer the product at a lower price, and eventually can attract mainstream customers, diverting sales away from the incumbent and forcing the market to compete under a new set of standards.
In education, disruptive innovation is forcing schools to rethink how they deliver content and what their role is. Rather than relying on the factory model of education, where everyone moves at the same pace in the same subjects, schools are recognizing that students all have different aptitudes, levels of background knowledge, and needs, and the current model doesn’t allow us to support those differences. Disruptive innovators are altering the methods by which schools provide content, and allowing students to customize their learning to meet their own needs rather than expecting them to walk in lockstep with their peers. Those changes also free up teachers to focus on more than just delivering lessons; instead, they can focus on fulfilling the social, emotional, and physical needs that help to keep the student healthy, engaged, and ready to learn.
References
Harvard Business Review. (2008, October 20). How to spot disruptive innovation opportunities [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGzXWO_anLI
Horn, M. B., Staker, H., & Christensen, C. M. (2015). Blended: Using disruptive innovation to improve schools. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Monday, J. (2009, July 23). Disruptive innovation [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaKgMcFP4Mo
