The Economist’s Schumpter column published an article on Clayton Christensen last week called Disrupting Mr Disrupter. The author isn’t quite as harsh as I was the other day but is sceptical nonetheless:
The problem is more that the definition of disruption he seeks to impose is too narrow. He rules out Uber because, from the start, it offered a better level of service than existing taxi firms, rather than something cheap but inferior. But ask any cabbie if it threatens to disrupt his business, and you will be left in no doubt of the answer. As Isaiah Berlin, a philosopher, would have put it, Mr Christensen is a hedgehog (someone who knows one big thing) rather than a fox (who knows lots of little things): his hedgehog mind leads him to ignore or belittle companies or market forces that do not fit his template.
I couldn’t agree more, but I would go further. What makes Christensen’s work so seductive (he was my favourite business author for many years) is that it is presented as emperical research, based on data, instead of the self-help anecdotes that dominate so much of busines literature.
But the data doesn’t confirm the theory. The MIT Sloan Management Review recently published an article, How Useful Is the Theory of Disruptive Innovation? that concludes that
few quantitative tests have been performed … [and] the ones that have been published fail to provide confirmatory evidence for the theory …
Christensen counters that “the lack of numerical support is the result of the blunt measures used in statistical analysis” where the “more nuanced case analysis” works much better.
It’s starting to sound like “case-based research” is a fancy word for “anecdotal evidence” and theories based on it should not be taken too seriously, no matter how useful they may sometimes be as general guidelines or war stories of what has worked and what hasn’t for others in the world of business.
