STRATEGY & INNOVATION
STRATEGY & INNOVATION offers articles to stimulate thinking and accelerate action, allowing readers to untangle the organizational challenges that can stymie innovation and go behind the scenes to see the operational tactics that leading organizations use to get their hot new ideas to market.
Strategy & Innovation
Current Issue
Let Disruption Fix Higher Education
The time has come for teaching-model universities
The time has come for teaching-model universities
By Henry Eyring
Recently Professor Clayton Christensen has been exploring the application of his disruptive innovation theory to education. In a 2008 article for BizEd he looked at business schools. In his latest book, "Disrupting Class", the subject is K-12 education. This leads us to wonder — what does disruption look like when applied to higher education? Higher education has adhered to research since the first modern universities were founded during the Renaissance. This model sucks money, faculty resources and attention away from students and towards research, publishing, and in some universities, major athletic programs. What’s needed is an alternate approach, based on teaching rather than on research. One such approach is the teaching model, which is beginning to take hold in some U.S. universities, focuses money, faculty resources, and attention to preparing students for the workplace.
Also in this Issue
- Innovators' Insights: When is Nonconsumption an Opportunity?
By Scott D. Anthony
You want to surprise people in your office? Ask them to estimate the percent of U.S. mobile phone subscribers who use email on their phones. Depending on who is doing the estimating, the figure ranges from seven to 13 percent. A startup company called Peek looked at those figures and saw disruptive opportunity. This week, Peek’s first product appeared in Target stores. The simple device, designed by product design powerhouse IDEO, allows users to send and receive email using T-Mobile’s wireless network for $20 a month. And that’s it. No phone, no wireless Internet connectivity, no attachments. Just email. Will Peek follow the Apple iPod or Pure Digital Flip video camera — both elegant devices that have grown markets through simplicity — on the road to disruptive success? - Voices of Disruption: TVLowCostUSA president Jim Lurie
By Renee Hopkins Callahan
Q. What is TVLowCost USA, and how did it start?
A. TVLowCost was started in France by John Paul Tréguer in 2004. He developed a process to get brands on TV that could not afford it before. Since then Tréguer has taken the model to 11 other countries, and in each one the business is a partnership with a local owner. Internationally, TVLowCost has created advertising campaigns for such companies as Heinz, Wrangler, Bose, Bayer, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Unilever. We have a simple, far less expensive way of developing and running TV campaigns. We just focus on TV. We create the spot, shoot it, edit it, produce it, and place it. In the U.S., we provide a complete initial package with a two- to three- spot campaign and the first 150 Gross Ratings Points (GRPs) of media — which provides good impact — all for a low flat rate that’s about one-third of what high-cost agencies charge. No surprises. Our flat-rate pricing model is very disruptive. - Emerging Technology Watch: LEDs in the Spotlight
Last week the Wall Street Journal noted that light-emitting diode (LED) technology has now reached the point that LED lights will begin to show up more and more in daily life. The article also offered an interesting look at how LED makers are managing the adoption curve on this promising yet still expensive technology — they intend to start out promoting LEDs to manufacturing customers whose lights are on constantly and who have more to gain from using lights that will burn less energy and stay on longer. - From the InnoBlog
Shoe(boxes) for the Masses: Disrupting Financial Services?
With the launch of its banking-by-shoebox service, Amsterdam-based bank Insinger de Beaufort created an elegantly simple offering that overcomes the barriers of time and skill that limit consumption of financial services. While Insinger’s shoebox service targets high-end consumers, could the model be altered to create a low-end disruption?
Apple's Genius Ponders Our Tastes
Apple’s new Genius for iTunes joins a long list of systems that leverage the wisdom of crowds to create improved products and services. The system may not make iTunes a more disruptive product (it adds features without any trade-offs), but it has the potential to be a powerful sustaining move. More broadly, seeking out and using crowds’ wisdom is easier than it has ever been, and many more new ways of taking advantage of it are undoubtedly yet to be discovered.