ON JANUART 23, the business community
lost Clayton Christensen to
leukemia at the age of 67. In his 1997
book The Innovator’s Dilemma, the
Rhodes Scholar and Harvard Business
School professor introduced his theory of disruptive innovation,
which held that even the most established incumbents
can be overturned by upstart firms that target new markets
with disruptive technologies. This theory would come to define
the next two decades of business thought and practice.
In his keynote at AACSB International’s 2006 Deans Conference
in San Diego, California, Christensen presented four traps
that can catch and kill high-potential disruptive ideas: assigning
responsibility to an incapable organization, using the wrong
process for developing strategy, funding it with bad money, or
assigning responsibility to people with the wrong skills.
At the same conference, Christensen applied his theory of
disruption to business education. Business schools, he argued,
would be transformed not as much by “low-end disruptors”
such as evening and weekend MBAs as by “new market disruptors”
such as in-house corporate training programs. And it was
already happening, he said, noting that “applications to MBA
programs are down 30 percent from the late 1990s.”
In the years since Christensen made these statements,
many notable MBA programs have disappeared, falling victim
not only to corporate training programs, but also to nontraditional
shorter-format options such as stackable credentials.
In a commentary that appeared in BizEd’s May/June 2008 issue, Christensen pointed out that “this shift in the management
education market began even while things were brightest
for business schools.” The tactics that had worked to keep business
schools on top for so long, he emphasized, were losing
efficacy against new competitors and for emerging markets.
One day, he noted, “people will ask the same question about
MBA programs that their professors taught them to ask about
successful companies that ultimately failed: Why didn’t they
see the wave coming?”
The Innovator’s DNA, which Christensen wrote with Jeff Dyer
and Hal Gregersen in 2011, notes that innovation—done right—is
the lifeblood of 21st-century organizations. “Imagine how competitive
your company will be ten years from now without innovators,”
they write. “Clearly your company would not survive.”