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This blog is the result of a discussion on how to share our thoughts and ideas on the books we have been reading. We decided to create a variety of items using many of the "open source" programs we will be highlighting this year with Chester County teachers.
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This book was eye-opening for me. Clayton Christensen is a professor at the Harvard Business School who coined the phrase, "A Disruptive Technology."
A "Disruptive Technology" is an innovation that usually starts out with fewer capabilities than existing technologies, but in some way offers an advantage to a niche market. As the technology develops, however, it eventually improves and ultimately replaces the dominant technology. An example would be PC's that were initially seen as toys, but eventually overtook the computing market replacing Main Frames and Mini Computers.
The most important lesson from this book was the fact that success inhibits innovation. If, as Jim Collins contends, "Good is the Enemy of Great," then "Success is the Enemy of Innovation."
Customers of successful companies do not want them to innovate, but rather the want them to "sustain" their products and services, or "incrementally" improve them. This is the Innovator's Dilemma.
This dilemma is most challenging in the field of education for two reasons. The first is that everyone in America has been to school and while they read that schools are not producing sought after results, most believe that their education was effective. Studies have also shown that most people agree that schools are not effective overall, but their local schools are an exception. Thus, the community might support incremental improvement, but certainly not disruptive innovation.
The second reason is that schools, as institutions, were really developed to "sustain" society, not disrupt it. Thus, education is not an inherently fertile environment for innovation.
Clayton Christensen wrote another book recently devoted to disruptive innovation in Education where he talks about how disruptive innovation can be introduced in education and contends that some disruptive innovations have already begun to take hold.
Some questions/things to brainstorm about:
How do we prepare students for jobs that don't already exist?
We need to do more problem finding before problem solving.
We need to find ways for teachers to build a learning community for their students to share and develop.
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