Wanted: Disruptive Ideas

Wanted: Disruptive Ideas

Clayton Christensen compares sustaining technology vs. disruptive technology. Sustaining Technology relies on incremental improvements to an already established technology. Disruptive Technology lacks refinement, often has performance problems because it is new, appeals to a limited audience, and may not yet have a proven practical application.

Clayton Christensen believes…

* Customized learning will help many more students succeed in school

* Student-centric classrooms will increase the demand for new technology

* Computers must be disruptively deployed to every student

* Disruptive innovation can circumvent roadblocks that have prevented other attempts at school reform

* We can compete in the global classroom-and get ahead in the global market

To be disruptive means not to compete with the teacher in the classroom or the school for resources or students. To be disruptive is to target then under served, ignored, and un-thought of areas of teaching and learning, as I pointed out in (Why I Still Think Marketing Could Improve Education)

We need to capitalize on disruptive technology, but we also need to seek, find, create, and implement “Disruptive Ideas.”  There is potential and opportunity to change education through Disruptive Ideas that do not challenge, impinge upon, or compete with the “Bricks and Mortar Model” We are not in competition. We are not trying to take as many students and resources away from the education establishment as possible. No we are bypassing the old education system. We are trying to build a new education system through Disruptive Ideas.

Buckminster Fuller once said, “To build a new system you don’t compete with the old one, you build a new system that makes the old one obsolete.”

That is core of Disruptive Ideas.