Are the dynamics of innovation changing?
Monday, July 27, 2009 at 09:25PM Ran across an intriguing article in Sunday’s New York Times. The author, Steve Lohr, raised the question of whether current trends may create a shift in advantage in innovation– from entrepreneurial companies to large ones. The argument is thatmany of today’s biggestproblems are in complex fields such as energy and the environment — and that solutions will need to be multidisciplinary rather than the work of entrepreneurial inventors. “The pendulum of thinking on innovation does seem to be swinging toward the big guys,” Lohr wrote. The article brought to mind for mean interview I conducted with Harvard Business School’s Clayton M. Christensen last fall. An edited version of the interview with Clay Christensen appeared in the Spring 2009 issue of MIT Sloan Management Review – but one point that didn’t make it into the published version (due to space constraints) was a brief observation Christensen made aboutestablished companies and disruptive innovation.Christensen noted that he had become”a lotmore optmistic” in the last five years about leading companies’ ability to successfully innovate disruptively, if the management team understands the principles of disruptive innovation.