The thesis of Clayton Christensen’s bestseller may be management common knowledge by now: as established companies innovate with sustaining technologies to move toward higher margins and higher performance in larger, mainstream markets whose needs they eventually overshoot, they become so resource dependent on their customers and investors and so locked in their values and processes, that they are unable to develop technologies catering to emerging, lower-margin markets which don’t solve their growth needs. New companies with disruptive technologies then enter and exploit the vacuum in the lower end markets, and subsequently move toward mainstream markets as their technology develops and becomes widely adopted, disrupting the established companies’ markets. What makes successful companies succeed in their mainstream markets is precisely what makes them fail in the face of disruptive technological change – complexity kills the cat.
The book is an academic’s and practitioner’s delight: well researched (plenty of evidence and case studies); well argued (crisp theoretical framework); and well written (Christensen makes excavators or steel making sound fascinating). It’s a great read, and it nicely puts into perspective many technological developments that have emerged since its publication more than a decade ago.
Because the book’s thesis has been proven over and over, there’s no need to rehash it. What does bear exploration is whether the book’s thesis applies to sustainability. Using Christensen’s definition of technology as “the processes by which an organization transforms labor, capital, materials, and information into products and services of greater value” and considering sustainability is a process, a few questions offer themselves:
- Is triple bottom line sustainability a disruptive technology? Is the ascent of sustainability a technological disruption?
- How are mainstream companies dealing with sustainability and are they headed toward failure in adopting it?
- If sustainability is disruptive, how can sustainable businesses become mainstream and edge out established companies?
I will explore these questions in a follow up post soon. Stay tuned!
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Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma, New York: Harper Collins, 1997.
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