RIP @claychristensen, who influenced the strategy of an entire generation of founders.
Christensen's term “disruptive” is used loosely today to mean any big change—but it actually has a precise, technical meaning.
In honor of his legacy, here's what “disruptive” actually means:
The term comes from his book *The Innovator's Dilemma*, one of the few well-researched and substantive books about innovation.
In the book, Christiansen looked at how incumbent companies get overthrown by startups.
He distinguished between two types of innovation: “sustaining” and “disruptive”.
A sustaining innovation is one that helps a company serve its existing customers better. It improves their products *along the axes their customers care about*.
In the book, he gives the example of excavators. When steam shovels transitioned to gasoline engines, that was a sustaining innovation: it did the same thing, more efficiently.
Crucially, *existing customers* were interested in the improved design.
A disruptive innovation is *not* better along the axes that existing customers are evaluating. It's often *worse*. But it's better along a *different* axis.
Often, a disruptive innovation is less powerful but much cheaper.
Continuing the excavator example, the backhoe was a disruptive innovation. It was less powerful than its predecessors in the market, with more limited reach.
But it was smaller, faster, and cheaper—and so it found a *new* market among small residential contractors.
Disruptive innovations succeed not by competing in an existing market, but by finding a new market, often opening up a market to a new segment. The new segment has different needs and is best served by a different technology.
The reason incumbents typically fail at disruptive innovation isn't that they're stupid, or even that they're slow and bureaucratic.
It's that they talk to their customers, and the existing customers *don't want* the new innovation. It doesn't meet their needs.
Startups are more likely to succeed at disruptive innovation because they find a *new* market that is better served by the new technology.
(Or used to be more likely… today everyone knows disruption theory so well that big companies are getting better at it!)
This happened multiple times in the computer industry as well. From mainframes to minicomputers to PCs to laptops to smartphones, each generation of computers was less powerful but also smaller, cheaper and more convenient.
The irony is that as technology improves and all products get more powerful and efficient, the disruptive approach often hits the point where it now meets the needs of the original market…
And the older approach by this point has often “overshot” the market, providing more power than anyone really needs.
Result: disruptive technology completely takes over. (Becoming the next incumbent, setting up the cycle to begin again)
That's *The Innovator's Dilemma* in a nutshell. There's much more in the book though. I particularly enjoyed Christiansen's analysis of an organization's capabilities into “resources, processes and values”: amazon.com/Innovators-Dil…
@OurWorldInData From the same page: “Amartya Sen famously noted in his 1999 book *Development as Freedom* that ‘there has never been a famine in a functioning multiparty democracy’”
(The @OurWorldInData article notes that “exceptions to this rule can be found – depending on the definition of ‘democracy’ and ‘famine’ being employed”, and discusses them in detail)
What are some compelling examples of new things we could do with energy abundance—say, 10x (or more) energy usage per capita?
In the 1930s, Winston Churchill (yes, Churchill) predicted that with fusion energy, “Schemes of cosmic magnitude would become feasible. Geography and climate would obey our orders.”
He also predicted “materials thirty times stronger than the best steel”, engines that carry “fuel for a thousand hours in a tank the size of a fountain-pen”, and farming “without recourse to sunlight”, all based on having enormously abundant energy at incredible energy densities.
Facebook is down this morning, apparently due to a BGP problem.
What's BGP? It's an absolutely essential but fairly obscure internet protocol. I have a CS degree, but I only know about it because I did a summer internship with @Akamai a very long time ago.
A brief explainer:
One of the more mind-blowing facts about the Internet is that *no one owns or manages all of it*, and there is no central authority keeping track of all of its parts. Authority and responsibility are distributed among a large number of ISPs who manage independent networks.
Each ISP has a map of its own network, so its routing computers can route packets of information internally. But how does information go beyond the confines of one ISP? How does a browser on Comcast talk to a website on AT&T?
Here's the original, from Oct 3, 1920. The plan was for an additional 830 miles of track over 25 years. The eventual capacity would be 5 billion passengers per year.
Said chief engineer Daniel Turner, “the growth of the city will never cease… in twenty-five years the population will be in the neighborhood of 9,000,000, and … the city must speedily provide facilities for the accommodation of an additional 2,000,000 passengers a year.”
In the 1960s, one of the top concerns of the environmentalist movement was “overpopulation”. Books such as *The Population Bomb* and *Famine 1975!* waged a campaign to sound the alarm.
What happened next:
*The Population Bomb*, by Paul and Anne Ehrlich, was particularly defeatist, opening with:
“The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s… hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”
In 1970, Paul Ehrlich said: “When you reach a point where you realize further efforts will be futile, you may as well look after yourself and your friends and enjoy what little time you have left. That point for me is 1972.”