8.2 Technological Stasis & The Pro-Disruption Bias

Marcos Antonio de Lima Filho, PhD.

Practitioners and academics have been very enthusiastic about the phenomenon of disruptive innovation. Books on disruption have sold hundreds of thousands of copies, readings on disruption are among the most used in MBA classes, and a Google search suggests that the term “disruptive innovation” is the most popular innovation term (Sood & Tellis, 2011). The term “disruption” has become a cultural phenomenon, as evidenced by its explosive popularity shown in Figure 2.8.1. Indeed, as Christensen once acknowledged:

Many leaders of small, entrepreneurial companies praise disruption as their guiding star, and so do many executives at large, well-established organisations (Christensen et al., 2015).

The widespread adoption of the term “disruption” has contributed to a broader cultural shift towards valuing and promoting innovation as a key driver of success. It has captured the imagination and attention of entrepreneurs, executives, designers, and the general public alike.

However, while the emphasis on disruption has brought innovation to the forefront, it is essential to acknowledge that it can also lead to a form of “trained ignorance”. When we place too much emphasis on disruption as the primary mode of innovation, we risk disregarding other important patterns of innovation selection that might also be relevant or even more appropriate in certain contexts.

Rogers brought attention to this pro-innovation “trained ignorance” all the way back in 1983: “The pro-innovation bias is limiting in an intellectual sense; we know too much about innovation successes, and not enough about innovation failures” (Rogers, 1983, p. 94). Despite his call, this form of bias is still prevalent in academic and practitioner circles, and it obviously favours disruptive and radical innovation concepts. So, rather than solving the problem, we aggravated and evolved it into a pro-disruption bias: “In order to succeed these days — and, especially, to pique an investor’s interest — a new venture must be disruptive” (Gassée, 2014).

The attention that academics and practitioners have spent on disruptive innovation is disproportionate to the bread-and-butter of innovation practice, which is incremental in scope and execution: “In reality, the bulk of design practice is incremental and separate from the appeal of technological revolutionism” (Biskjaer et al., 2019). This biased view also ignores other patterns of innovation that work against change, thus reinforcing the dominance and stability of design concepts. It leads researchers to overlook the study of ignorance about innovations, and to under-emphasise the rejection or discontinuance of innovations (Rogers, 1983).

To address this issue, Rogers (1983) urged researchers to recognise that rejection, discontinuation, and reinvention often happen throughout the lifespan of an innovation. Indeed, the current electrification of automobiles is a reinvention of a century-old concept. In the early days of the automobile industry, no dominant approach emerged regarding the choice of fuel for engines (Abernathy et al., 1983). The market showcased a diverse range of concepts, including steam cars, electric cars, and gasoline cars. Out of the 4,192 automobiles produced by American manufacturers in 1900, 1,681 (40.1%) were powered by steam, 1,575 (37.6%) by electricity, and 936 (22.3%) by gasoline, as reported by the U.S. Census Bureau (1902, p. 255). However, this near-dominance of electric vehicles rapidly waned as gasoline-powered vehicles advanced:

At the census of 1905 21,692 automobiles were manufactured (…) Of this number, 18,699, or 86.2%, were propelled by gasoline; 1,425, or 6.6%, by electricity; and 1,568, or 7.2%, by steam (U.S. Census Bureau, 1908, p. 272).

The development of electric vehicles has been characterised by cycles of adoption, discontinuation, and reinvention, occurring roughly a century apart. These cycles provide valuable lessons and insights into the dynamics of innovation. However, the prevalent pro-innovation and pro-disruption biases lead us to overlook these instances of “unsuccessful diffusions”.

The evolution of industries also exhibits more patterns than disruptive and radical innovations, such as stability and purification, but current innovation literature has no interest in this phenomena. Innovation scholars have treated the stabilisation of design concepts as a non-subject, much like evolutionary theorists used to ignore stasis as a meaningful and predominant pattern within the history of species. This changed in 1972 when Eldredge and Gould opened the eyes of evolutionary biologists to the fact that “stasis is data”:

How odd, though, to define the most common of all palaeontological phenomena as beyond interest or notice! Yet palaeontologists never wrote papers on the absence of change in lineages before punctuated equilibrium granted the subject some theoretical space. And, even worse, as paleontologists didn't discuss stasis, most evolutionary biologists assumed continual change as a norm, and didn't even know that stability dominates the fossil record (Gould & Eldredge, 1993).

Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould overturned the conventional wisdom that species evolved in a gradual, continuous model of evolution. Instead, their model of punctuated equilibrium proposed that evolution was characterised by stability, followed by rare bursts of rapid evolutionary change (Eldredge & Gould, 1972). The heated debate on this topic in the 1970s has given way to the acceptance that evolution is sometimes gradual, sometimes punctuational, and sometimes in between (Wallace, 2011, p. 350).

Following this paradigm shift, punctuated equilibrium resonated among innovation scholars in the 1980s. For them, technological evolution was characterised by “periods of great experimentation followed by the accep­tance of a dominant design” (Henderson & Clark, 1990). Like the fossil record, “the economic history of technology displays a similar dynamic pattern of long periods of stagnation or very slow change, punctuated by sudden outbursts like the Industrial Revolution” (Mokyr, 1990). These rare discontinuities trigger a period of technological ferment, which lasts until a dominant design emerges (Tushman & Anderson, 1986). These punctuated views on technological innovation adhered to the research tradition pioneered by Abernathy and colleagues, whose rationale was overtly evolutionary:

The stabilisation of design concepts, in which industry maturity consists, makes productive units increasingly vulnerable to changes in technology, market preference, and relative prices: As does a biological species that has become perfectly adapted to a particular environmental niche, mature industries carry with them the implicit threat of extinction or, at least, catastrophe if environmental conditions should suddenly or radically shift (Abernathy et al., 1983, p. 28).

Instead of a biassed view that favoured radical and disruptive innovations, this research tradition promoted a balanced view of industrial evolution: “Though many observers emphasise new-product inno­vation, process and incremental innovations may have equal or even greater commercial importance” (Abernathy & Utterback, 1978). Unfortunately, as already discussed, The Innovator’s Dilemma was highly disruptive of this research tradition (Section 6.2). Christensen’s theory of disruption eliminated the idea of dominant designs, which had previously been used to explain both the disruption and stability of industries.

Ultimately, the pro-innovation bias cautioned by Rogers has been exacerbated by Christensen’s focus on a highly specific pattern of innovation. All other innovation patterns have been subsumed under the “sustaining innovation” category, which plays a minor role in disruption theory. Such ignorance of other innovation patterns is a problem since “no bias can be more constricting than invisibility” (Gould & Eldredge, 1993).