Constraining Disruption

Disruptive innovation is often thought of as an unexpected and significant shift in how an offering addresses a job need. By that definition, it's unclear whether the MIT picture taking example John Sviokla discusses in "Getting Started in Disruptive Business Design" is really disruptive...it's not clear exactly what job/market is being served by a $150 high altititude picture-taking capability.

However, each of the four ideas he discusses shows how important constraints are in sparking disruptive innovation. One key constraint is the importance of focusing on a radical improvement in only *one* area (e.g., cost in the MIT example).

The MIT example also, perhaps inadvertently, illustrates two other aspects of disruptive innovation...one positive and one negative.

First, very expensive IT-intensive infrastructure is becoming cheap, pervasive, and interoperable. The MIT students leveraged the cell phone and GPS systems to quickly and inexpensively cobble together a basic capability.

And, as one of the students admits (in the Boston Globe article), most of their engineering classmates are unimpressed...what they did was just not complex enough. This may be the most significant barrier to disruptive innovation---engineers who prefer "cool engineering" over "cool capabilities."