How Disruptive Innovation Changes Education

HBS professor Clayton M. Christensen, who developed the theory of disruptive innovation, joins colleagues Michael B. Horn and Curtis W. Johnson to advocate for ways in which ideas around innovation can spur much-needed improvements in public education. A Q&A with the authors of Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns. Key concepts include:

* As an industry, education has certain elements that have made the market difficult to penetrate and lasting reform hard to come by.

* As a general rule, the most promising areas for innovation are pockets or areas that appear unattractive or inconsequential to industry incumbents and where there are people who would like to do something but cannot access the available offering.

* To improve education as an industry, businesspeople might consider investing in technological platforms that will allow for robust educational user networks to emerge.

How can schools around the world educate their students better? What does the future hold? Most researchers who study these questions in the field of education peer through the lenses of sociology and public policy. HBS professor Clayton M. Christensen and colleagues chose a different approach—the theory of disruptive innovation, often applied to a variety of other industries, such as technology and health care. Christensen’s theory was first explored in his two New York Times bestsellers, The Innovator’s Dilemma (1997) and The Innovator’s Solution (with Michael E. Raynor, 2003).

Q&A with: Clayton M. Christensen

Author: Martha Lagace

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