Disruptive Innovation

Disruptive Innovation

The term disruptive innovation as we know it today first appeared in the 1997 best-sellerThe Innovator’s Dilemma by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen.  Disruptive innovation is a new technology or innovation that displaces a sustaining technology or innovation. Most of the time, it is radically different from the technology it displaces, and often is a poorer performer. Although the latter may be counterintuitive at first, the disruptive technology usually captures the imagination of the market because it brings with it a twist not provided by the sustaining technology. It meets an unserved need for some unserved segment of the market. Digital cameras, for example, were a disruptive technology. Although the initial products created pictures that were far lower in quality than a traditional film-based camera, and they were fairly expensive, they permitted users to take, examine, and delete unwanted pictures without the need to pay to have them developed. 

Christensen points out the displacing technology is often a poorer performer and the reason it is successful is because it meets an unserved need for some unserved segment of the market. 

Consider Bible Study, Worship and Love for the sake of this conversation as technology for a moment. We can hit a home run in the quality of our worship and the style of our teaching and fail to love and lose the opportunity to minister to families. If love is an unserved need for an unserved segment of the market people will often, if not always, choose authenticity demonstrated by love over a well designed worship service or well presented lesson. 

Fortunately, we, church members, don't have to choose between quality and love; actually, true quality would be the result of modeling the love of Jesus. The point here is actually simple. Don't get so caught up in excellence, presentation and style that you forget to love. If the unserved segment of our population is folks that don't feel loved we might need to take a step back to the ole proverbial drawing board. On second thought run back to the drawing board you missed the Biblical mark entirely. 

Disruption, often referred to as change, is usually an unwelcome intruder we want to keep at bay. However, disruption is what brings about great ideas. Maybe you have heard the old saying, "Necessity is the mother of invention". When we become uncomfortable we begin to strategize, think outside the box, develop new ideas or solutions. If you hear folks making suggestions consider yourself lucky and listen to what they are saying. If you hear people complaining they might just feel unloved. If you have people leaving you missed the smoke signals and you better come to grips with the fact that you have an unserved segment of the population in your class or church.