Disruptive+Innovation

Innovations in any field are not the product of a slow, step-by-step climb. They are characterized by leaps and jumps. A recent example has been the jump into computer technology and particularly the internet made possible through the development of affordable personal computers. In thirteen years, the web has grown from just a few hundred sites to, as of March 2009, **224,749,695** sites ([]).

One of the original people to point out this pattern is Thomas Kuhn, the author of "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." Here is an outline of that book: [|http://www.des.emory.edu/mfp/Kuhn.html]

The idea of a paradigm shift, I believe, is akin to Piaget's concept of equilibrium and disequilibrium. A paradigm or a scheme is a way of understanding the world. It's the group of rules and laws that we use to predict the outcome of novel events. Children's paradigms for animals have often been used to illustrate the need to change a scheme: a child who owns a dog is likely to see a cat (four legs, furry, not-human) and call it a dog. The anomolous information the child gets is that this is not a dog, it's a cat. Dogs go bow-wow and cats go meow. So the child has to adjust his or her scheme to account for this information.

The same thing happens on a more sophisticated intellectual level to scientists. For example, one paradigm shift that arose was when the telescope was invented and scientists discovered that we live in a heliocentric system rather than a geocentric system. In other words, the earth goes around the sun and not the other way around.

Disruptive innovation is a concept developed by Clayton Christensen to describe what happens when a new technology or idea significantly changes how something is done. In business, it is useful for decision-makers to consider, if they want their company to not become obsolete.

For example, digital cameras are a disruptive innovation. They are rapidly replacing film cameras. But initially they weren't on the radar for high end camera companies because originally their quality was low. They were initially attractive to a market niche that the high end camera companies were not that interested in serving--people who wanted the convenience of digital pictures but didn't necessarily mind the lower quality.

Eventually digital cameras' quality has changed for the better and now they are of interest to high end photographers. Probably within the next fifteen to twenty years film technology will be almost completely finished, if not before.

In the education field, the disruptive innovation has been the development of the internet as a medium for teaching.

Traditional universities have a different set of goals from profit-making schools that use the internet as a primary medium for teaching. The for-profit schools' purposes are to give students credentials so students can get particular jobs. As a result, traditional universities are having a hard time adjusting to the new context wherein it is not desirable for students to sit in class or to learn just for the sake of learning. Distance learning over the internet has been a disruptive innovation, then, for traditional universities.

Another aspect of internet learning that relates to it as a disruptive innovation is the fact that it appeals to a class of students that traditional universities have considered to be marginal: older students who want to get a bachelor's degree or want some kind of certification such as a teaching license. The availability of online classes has made college more appealing to people with full time jobs and families to take care of.

If traditional universities want to continue to do well in this context and also offer what they have which is unique to this type of institution (a commitment to gaining knowledge beyond what one is teaching--research), then we need to prepare ourselves for teaching older students who do not need the high-schoolish approach to teaching and assignments in undergraduate programs.