Lunch With Clay Christensen Prompts Lively Conversation About Disruption and Innovation in Healthcare and Education

Posted by Melissa Withers on June 16, 2009

On June 2, the Business Innovation Factory hosted a luncheon with Clay Christensen for a conversation about the role “disruption” will (and should) play in transforming the healthcare industry and the American education system. In their dysfunction, these two systems have much in common and analysis of both shows deep systems-level issues that effectively block innovation.

The ability of technology to "disrupt" long-established business practices - dramatically changing the landscape of industries by increasing access, cutting costs, and revolutionizing delivery - has been a subject discussed for decades and is the topic of Christensen's iconic volumes, The Innovator's Dilemma and The Innovator's Solution. Yet, as Christensen has observed, these radical, innovation-driven transformations have been largely absent in the education and health industries--perhaps the two most important arenas of everyday life. In two new books, Disrupting Class and The Innovator's Prescription, Christensen and coauthors address how new technology might upend familiar institutions and fundamentally alter the way schooling and health care are delivered.

Christensen has been a member of the BIF network for many years (he is a member of our Research Advisory Council and has been a storyteller at two BIF Summits) and the time seemed right to bring Clay to Providence for a deeper conversation about healthcare and education. With Experience Labs established in both of these important areas, BIF has a deep interest in applying much of Clay’s thinking to our project work.

Clay began his career in business. Spend a few minutes with him, and you'll understand why he switched to academics. He is a born teacher. He's also both a theoretical and practical trainer helping companies discover markets that do not yet exist.

"The Innovator's Dilemma," Clay's seminal work on disruption, is more than a decade old. When it was published, "the revolutionary book that will change the way you do business," became a bible for technology entrepreneurs and executives alike. His follow up book, "The Innovator's Solution," offered a framework for companies to achieve sustained growth. Interestingly, it's only in the last few years that Clay feels his ideas have finally caught on to become broadly understood and applied beyond the technology industry. With his most recent books, Clay is taking his theories and thinking about disruption and applying them specifically to high impact areas, like healthcare and education. It’s enlightening to see these ideas—tried and found to hold true in the business world time again—applied to public sector issues. It’s obvious that Clay deeply values education and that the move into the conversation about education is a natural one for him.

The meet-up was punctuated with moments of great insight, but I was most struck by what may be the most simple of Clay’s assertions: “The disruptive game begins before the sustaining model ends.” Clay elaborated to add that “you’re not always competing against who you think are competing against,” offering all a reminder of how disruptive innovation works. So whether you are are the disrupter or the disrupted, once a disruptive innovation is upon you there is little you can do to compete against it.

It was exciting and thoroughly provocative to apply the tenets of disruptive innovation to education and healthcare and to do it with a small group of industry leaders charged with leading transformation within their own organizations. Participants in the lunchtime included Bari Harlam, VP Relationship Marketing, CVS Caremark; Dave Johnson, SVP, Home & Business Networks, American Power Conversion; Arthur Klein, Sr. VP of Children’s Services, Chief of Staff at Schneider Children’s Hospital, North Shore-LIJ Health System Foundation; Melissa Kollitides, Director, Online Pharmacy, CVS Caremark; Stephen Lane, Founder, Ximedica; Dennis Littky, Co-Founder and Co-Director, The Big Picture Company; Thomas Nealssohn, Manager, Innovation Implementation Svcs, Masco Corporation Research & Development; Jaymin Patel, President and CEO, GTECH; Robert Shea, VP for Business Affairs & CFO, Community College of Rhode Island; Peter Snyder, Vice President for Research, Lifespan; Donald Stanford, Acting CTO, GTECH Technology Fellow, GTECH; Mark Turrell, CEO, Imaginatik; Chantal Weinhold, Executive Director, Schneider Children's Hospital; and Harry West, Vice President, Strategy and Innovation, Continuum.

We’re editing a podcast of the conversation and look forward to sharing that soon. In the meantime, you can watch a video of Clay discussing re-architecting healthcare and education at BIF-3 http://www.businessinnovationfactory.com/weblog/archives/2009/02/video_b...). His thinking has progressed since this presentation, but the core principles of the conversation remain unchanged...and utterly invaluable to anyone interested in transformative innovation.