The Implication of Disruption

As Research Narrative settles into our new office digs in the entrepreneurial community known as “Silicon Beach,” it seems a good time to bring up a buzz word that is all the rage at beachside networking events and startup pitchfests. Disruption. With a capital D.

In this part of town, it’s near about impossible to go half an hour without hearing someone speak excitedly of Disruption. Even among companies whose technology solution is precisely innovative without being disruptive, startups that brilliantly address a marketplace pain point that no existing technology has yet to address, credit is taken for being Disruptive. There seems to be a romantic notion that being a Disruptor is the iconic beacon of success for an entrepreneur.

But is it? And should it be?

I can’t help but wonder: why exactly have we collectively embraced the word “Disruption” as the embodiment of technology progress? Why is it so stylish to be a Disruptive Innovator rather than simply an Innovator? Even my own field has gotten so hung up on Disruption that we have an award for it: the Next Gen Market Research Disruptive Innovator Award. (We’ll set aside, for a moment, my perspective that most of the past nominees weren’t disrupting much of anything, but were in fact growing the research pie with incremental services that offer incremental insight. But that’s another blog, for another day.)

Let’s take a moment to address the semantics of what the word “disrupt” actually means. To disrupt is to create disorder, to interrupt, to impede, to break. The word itself is fundamentally rooted in negative connotation, in being an impediment to progress. 

dis·rupt  

tr.v. dis·rupt·ed, dis·rupt·ing, dis·rupts

1. To throw into confusion or disorder: Protesters disrupted the candidate's speech.

2. To interrupt or impede the progress, movement, or procedure of: Our efforts in the garden were disrupted by an early frost.

3. To break or burst; rupture.

That doesn’t really seem a noble goal, much less a practical one. And it becomes a setback to business progress when we confuse Disruption as an outcome with Disruption as a purpose. There is a world of difference between these two scenarios. 

A recent article on the website ReadWrite, “Steve Jobs: The Least Disruptive Entrepreneur Ever,” touches upon this distinction in discussing the upcoming Steve Jobs biopic. In his review of the movie, the reviewer reflects on the realization that Apple’s greatest successes were far more about problem solving than Disruption.

 “There is a vogue in Silicon Valley today for disruption—the eruptive flood of change, washing away the old and leaving in place the new…But the message of "Jobs" is quite different. What we learn by watching Jobs over the decades, from the '70s to the earliest years of the present millennium, is that he was at his best not when he disrupted but when he took what was broken and fixed it. Disruption is facile. Disruption is easy. Disruption is ineffective. It's the technological equivalent of a temper tantrum—nothing more. What Jobs did at Apple is the exact opposite.” 

One could reasonably argue that Steve Jobs actually was highly Disruptive: iTunes certainly did no favors for the profitability of the music business. But Apple also didn’t de-bundle albums and accustom listeners to free music. The now defunct Napster did that. With iTunes and iPods, Apple then came in with a solution to monetize that already disrupted market. So did Jobs set out to Disrupt? Or did he set out to conquer and solve an inevitable disruption, and in doing so, change the world? I’d argue the latter. Apple wasn’t afraid to change the status quo, but Steve Jobs didn’t digitize music or invent portable music players or de-wire your phone line.  He simply took all those things and did a better job than everyone else in understanding consumer behavior and building a sustainable business of it. Disruption was the result of smart business, but it wasn’t the business plan itself.

The entrepreneurial community’s hyper-focus on Disruption perhaps fascinates me because I was an early and avid champion for what turned out to be the most disruptive technology of market research in my adult lifetime – the online survey. But back in the 1990s, I wasn’t excited about online surveying because it was going to obliterate the gold standard of phone surveys, which it did. I was excited about it because online surveys took what a phone survey could do and blew the capabilities out of the water. The online interface opened up a whole new world of audiovisual assessment and integrated new tools like copy testing and card sorting. It had lower overhead and faster turnaround. The shift from phone to web increased value while decreasing overhead: it wasn’t innovation for innovation’s sake, but for progress’s sake.

Today, it seems that new developments often lack such business implication and implicit value. Joy is taken in crushing existing technologies almost for sport, rather than in deriving solutions that offer practical business solutions that solve a problem or introduce a viable new opportunity.  

I’ll come back to a company I’ve mentioned before to illustrate my point: Aereo. In basic principle, Aereo’s business model relies on charging for copyrighted content it doesn’t own or license. In laymen’s terms, it effectively relies on theft, and in doing so devalues the very content creators it relies on to exist. (Did we learn nothing from Napster?) It’s also a business that fundamentally decreases consumer value - broadcast TV is already free to us on-air and online; Aereo charges a fee. The technology may be clever and elegant from an engineering perspective, but it sets out to demolish an ecosystem using a business model that will keep it in court for years, without benefitting society in any meaningful way.  

Have we so lost sight of basic economic principles, nevermind social ethics, that we can no longer identify when Disruption is simply corrupt or flawed business? Might we even be subjecting ourselves to increasing government regulation precisely because we’re so busy scrambling to change the game that we’re not regulating ourselves with a touch of common sense?

To Disrupt simply for the sake of Disruption is to focus on the wrong thing – on change over value creation. It causes us to mistake “innovation” for “progress” and confuse “new” with “valuable.” Change can be amazing, fruitful, and industrious. But sometimes it can merely be an economic black hole, destroying value and recklessly putting people out of work, without benefitting consumers. As I setup anchor in the inspirational surroundings of Silicon Beach, it occurs to me that perhaps my greatest goal as a business owner and entrepreneur is to recognize and remember the difference.

-KE

Read the review of the Steve Jobs biopic here: 

http://readwrite.com/2013/07/26/steve-jobs-jobs-movie-disruption-versus-improvement#awesm=~odHo7I7aq2kiSL