Geoffrey Moore: Disrupting myths of disruptive innovation

By Tom Foremski - February 7, 2006

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

Geoffrey Moore, one of Silicon Valley's top IT consultants has published a column disrupting the notion of disruptive innovation, as one of ten myths about innovation.

In "Top 10 Innovation Myths" published on Sandhill.com, Mr Moore attacks the belief that innovation is inherently disruptive.


To be sure, authors like Clay Christensen and myself have spent much of our life's work chronicling the impact of disruptive innovation, but it is only one type among many. And the more established your company, the less likely it is a type for you to specialize in. Alternatives include application innovation, product innovation, platform innovation, line extension innovation, design innovation, marketing innovation, experiential innovation, value engineering innovation, integration innovation, process innovation, value migration innovation, and acquisition innovation.

I respectfully disagree. In this passage Mr Moore applies the term innovation so liberally, that it might seem that he has proved his point by showing innovation in its numerous forms, and that this somehow dilutes the value and the qualities of the term.

I think innovation *always* has to have the quality of disruption. It is something which causes everyone affected by it--to adopt it or die. Innovation is always the better way.

Because if an innovation is not sufficiently disruptive it will not overcome the inertia of the status quo--and will therefore not be classed as innovative. It's a circular argument, but completely within the nature of the term's meaning, imho.

The other forms of innovation that Mr Moore might be indicating I might classify as incremental efficiencies, or what in the the chip industry would be called "design shrinks." That's when chipmakers use their current silicon technology infrastructure to develop ways of reducing the size of their chip designs--producing a few more chips per wafer, and nudging up profit margins.

I think that innovation has to be very disruptive and offer a superbly excellent ROI in order to gain attention, and overcome cost of switching barriers.

And every Silicon Valley startup had better have some kind of disruptive innovation in its garage otherwise why bother?

In the chip industry, innovation comes about every ten years when it retools itself for larger silicon wafer sizes. The chip industry is currently switching to 12-inch wafers from 8-inch wafers.

That automatically improves produtivity by 2.4 times while reducing unit production costs, requiring less human labor, which reduces contamination and improves yields. [The bunnysuits protect the chips from the workers.]

A 12-inch wafer chip production technology is a disruptive innovation--there is no way an 8-inch wafer fab can compete against the massive gains in manufacturing efficiencies.

But each time the chip industry makes the transition to a larger wafer size--the technology differentiation between the chip makers becomes far less dramatic and disruptive.

Please take a look at Mr Moore's column "Top 10 Innovation Myths" He has a tremendous track record and is one of our top thought leaders on IT strategy and author of Crossing the Chasm and other ground breaking books.

And he has a new book to promote :

Dealing with Darwin : How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their Evolution

- - -

I had an interesting meeting with Mr Moore about six months ago:

Deadly dull enterprise IT markets--Geoffrey Moore and John Gallant hope Vortex conference will spice things up

[thoughtleader thursday] More from Geoffrey Moore and John Gallant on IT strategy. . .

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February 7, 2006 | Permalink | Comment | Category: Thoughtleaders | Subscribe to SVW

Comments (4)

vinnie mirchandani:

I happen to agree with Geoffrey that innovation does not have to be disruptive. Frankly tech vendors tend to look at each other when the real neat stuff happens in applied innovation done by CIOs and CTOs...on my blog I have written about creative uses of basic building blocks at Steelcase, NFL, Starbucks, Jetblue etc. Practical application more than whiz bang, dispurtive stuff is what ends up being called innovation in the business world.

Where I disagree with Geoffrey is his talk about market commoditization. The cheaper the building blocks, the more applied innovation that happens.
Most vendors only invest 10-15% of revs in to R&D and only half or so goes in to new stuff, v/s tweaking old stuff. I would rather vendors charge less and let CIOs have the full dollar back - "full oxygen" to do their own applied innovation rather than just deliver the 7.5% of innovation on the buck. It is pretty shameful that the tech industry spends 3 to 4 times as much in sales and marketing v/s new product development to create the "illusion" of innovation

Posted: February 10, 2006 7:33 PM

Antony Awaida:

Here is a - somewhat tongue in cheek - proposal to settle this debate: Rather than quibble over semantics (and since I'm an engineer by training), I prefer to use numbers: Googling “incremental innovations” resulted in about 5.5 million hits, while Googling for “disruptive innovations” yielded a measly 2.6 million hits. If all innovation is disruptive, why are more people talking about incremental innovation? More fundamentally perhaps, why would people use the tongue twister "disruptive innovation" instead of just "innovation"?

The complete article can be found on my blog at:
http://startleap.typepad.com/startleap_weblog/2006/02/microsoft_oracl.html

Posted: February 17, 2006 9:46 AM

Al Brown:

Innovation does not always have to be disruptive.

If you are on a desert island by yourself and come up with a new way to open a coconut, that's an innovation. But it's not disruptive, especially if you spend the time saved catching some zs.

And if it were always disruptive, you wouldn't need an additional adjective. Sort of why expressions "wet water", "hot fire" and "round wheel" are used much.

Posted: February 22, 2007 1:49 PM

Tom Foremski:

(Sorry for the late replies!)
Vinnie: You are right, lots is spent to create an illusion of innovation, which in a roundabout way is what I'm trying to say in my post... Just talking about innovation doesn't mean you are actually innovating.

Anthony: Google's numbers show that most people are talking about incremental innovation but that just shows that people would love to attach the term innovation to incremental improvements, otherwise why try to "dress" things up that way?

Al: My apologies, I meant to use the term innovation applied to business and business processes. Coconuts and desert islands do not have an economy, but if they did, and I could crack open ten times as many coconuts as anyone else in the same amount of time--that would be a disruptive innovation.

Posted: February 22, 2007 9:41 PM

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