Is Disruptive Innovation Really Such A Good Thing?

This week I read an essay by Health Futures President Jeff Goldsmith which made a case for moving beyond a much-beloved way of thinking about innovation and growth. In his essay, which appeared in The Health Care Blog, author Goldsmith argues that the concept of disruption as having “passed its sell-by date” after mass adoption by those who see it as gospel. To be certain, there’s much to admire in the theory, which was outlined by Clayton Christensen in his 1997 book The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. In this book, Christensen defines disruptive innovation as the process in which a smaller company with fewer resources gradually takes over a market niche by capturing customers at the bottom of the market. We’re all familiar with how this plays out. The once-tiny bookseller Amazon trounces brick-and-mortar bookstores and eventually the entire retail e-commerce sector.  Apple rolls out the smartphone and it transforms the way we consume and use digital information, steamrolling its way into new markets and eating the lunch of countless companies in this space. And so on. Over the 25 years since it was introduced, the disruption thesis has become a core concept in the venture capital and private equity worlds. This includes, of course, VCs focused on health technology investments. As a writer covering HIT, I have been bombarded with public relations pitches insisting that a given healthtech startup was going to “disrupt” what...
Source: EMR and HIPAA - Category: Information Technology Authors: Tags: Ambulatory Clinical Health IT Company Healthcare IT Hospital - Health System Telemedicine and Remote Monitoring Clayton Christensen Disruptive Innovation Disruptive Technology Healthcare Disruption Healthcare Innovation Healthtech Source Type: blogs