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When being disruptive is a good thing

Northumbria recently curated a programme of events as part of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s Disruptive Innovation Festival - a global, online festival that brought together thought-leaders, entrepreneurs and businesses to inspire positive change to the future economy. Here, Mark Bailey, Teaching Fellow in Northumbria’s Design department uncovers the real meaning of Disruptive Innovation.

‘Disruptive Innovation’, ‘Breakthrough Innovation’, ‘Game-changing Innovation’ – these are the buzz-words of today’s business leaders seeking commercial advantage. It’s worth pausing for a moment to consider just what disruptive innovation is, and whether it really is right for all situations.

There are many definitions of innovation. In essence they all converge around the same theme - bringing bright ideas to life in order to create positive change. Disruption, on the other hand, has negative connotations of breakdown and failure.

Disruptive innovation, however, breaks something that already exists in order to create a better future solution.

An example of such disruptive innovation can be found in the Boeing 787 Dreamliner. Boeing had to respond to two challenges: the commercial challenge posed by Airbus entering the super-sized airliner market with their A380 and the social challenge posed by increasing environmental concerns and passenger demands for ever increasing levels of comfort and service. With these in mind, Boeing came up with a blueprint for a new aircraft that simply could not be produced using conventional approaches. With nearly a century of expertise in aluminium aircraft construction (as well as vast factories and established supply-chains devoted to this approach), and with limited experience in alternative production methods, Boeing took the brave decision to completely disrupt their business, and the market, by developing the Dreamliner; an aircraft that could meet their ambitious brief if manufactured using advanced plastics. Whilst Dreamliner has attracted some negative press, it has been a huge success, and Boeing’s competitors are left playing catch-up.

In everyday life, disruption is uncomfortable, challenging, troublesome and unwelcome. Similarly in commercial life, the greatest business leaders recognise that only disruptive innovation will bring about meaningful change when maintaining the status quo is unsustainable. Boeing found themselves thoroughly disrupted by the Dreamliner programme having to develop all-new management competencies, knowledge and skills in order to deliver their goal - a game-changing new product. The result is not just a new product and a challenge for competitors to respond to, but more importantly, a changed organisational culture in which innovation can flourish.

Consumers aren’t always ready to accept disruption. They need to see tangible benefits that speak to their particular circumstances in order to buy into something new, especially if they are being asked to pay more than for an established product. Smart businesses recognise this and tend to operate on three levels of innovation (often described as incremental, radical and disruptive) in order to protect their short, mid and long-term interests.

Of course, innovation for commercial gain should not come at the expense of social benefit; the two are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, the most responsible of organisations see them as mutually inclusive. Unilever, with whom Northumbria has a creative partnership working collaboratively on their Sustainable Living Plan, have placed social benefit at the core of their corporate strategy. This strategy is so simply expressed that all employees can rally around it:

[Unilever will] “help more than a billion people take action to improve their health and well-being. Halve the environmental footprint of the making and use of our products as we grow our business. Enhance the livelihoods of millions of people as we grow our business.”

As a business, they know that they need to be working at all three levels of innovation and their people need to establish a culture of innovation. Their very ambitious Sustainable Living Plan gives employees permission to innovate, to take risks and push boundaries – to become uncomfortable!

As an innovative University, we have a responsibility to launch future leaders into the world with a clear understanding of the role of innovation in business and society and with the capacity to develop and deliver positive change. Innovation is not a solo-act and it isn’t the sole preserve of designers. In an increasingly complex world, innovation is necessarily collaborative and multidisciplinary. It capitalises on scientific and technological discovery, as well as business know-how and a deep understanding of stakeholder behaviour. Successful innovation requires a blend of context-specific specialist knowledge given meaning through design. It is for this reason that the MA/MSc Multidisciplinary Innovation (MDI) Masters degree was developed and runs through the University’s INNOVATE facilities at the Northern Design Centre in Gateshead.

MDI is an intensive one year programme that brings together graduates with specialisms in design, technology and business to learn together through engaging in real-world problem defining and solving. The students work on projects with clients ranging from regional start-ups and SME’s to global corporations and across all sectors, from charities, social enterprises and Government departments to global manufacturing companies and service providers. While they learn to use, and develop, innovation practice approaches, methods and tools, the main purpose of their education is to enable them to develop as individuals with the knowledge, skills and confidence to venture into the unknown. We do not seek to create purely disruptive innovators, but rather ‘responsible innovators’ - innovators who consider the consequences of their innovations and who understand when to be disruptive and when to be incremental.

To find out more about Northumbria’s MDI course, watch this film or visit www.northumbria.ac.uk/pg to see the full range of postgraduate opportunities on offer.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Mark Bailey .