As a Product Manager for HBS Online, I had the good fortune to work with Clayton Christensen, an expert on strategy, innovation, and growth.
Professor Christensen’s MBA course Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise is based on his book The Innovator’s Solution, the sequel to his enormously impactful The Innovator’s Dilemma.
Having written more than nine books on disruption and innovation, Professor Christensen founded a nonprofit institute, a consulting firm, and a boutique investment firm—all focused on disseminating his research and ideas on innovation. With such a large global presence, one would think that Professor Christensen wouldn’t need any more help scaling his ideas.
Last year, however, the team at HBS Online worked diligently with Professor Christensen to produce and launch the first-ever HBS Online Course: Disruptive Strategy. We spoke with Professor Christensen and asked why he chose to put his content online, even after seeing success with his other initiatives. The answer was two-fold and—not surprisingly—mirrors Professor Christensen's very own theories.
Creating Maximum Exposure
According to Professor Christensen, online learning can scale in a way that no other type of learning can. Harvard Business School is a selective and expensive graduate program that only benefits 900 students per year. And even then, there are enough seats in Professor Christensen's course for only a third of them.
As he explained, “I put [my content] on HBS Online because if I don’t do that, then every year, at maximum, 900 people will be exposed to the theories, and many more people need to have access."
By using the course platform as a digital thoroughfare, the theories of disruption, innovation, and successful strategic growth no longer need to be exclusive and can now help organizations that are both large incumbents in need of change, but also small and agile that may not be able to afford a consulting session.
Reaching New Audiences
By leveraging the reach of the internet, Professor Christensen's theories can now be consumed by organizations in distant locales that don’t have access to conferences and speaking events. Disruptive Strategy can travel to any place in the world that has electricity and an internet connection, thus opening up new markets for this high-level educational content.
In fact, one of HBS Online’s most recent cohorts is a small nonprofit in Lagos, Nigeria called West Africa Vocational Education (WAVE). WAVE’s mission is to tackle youth unemployment in West Africa, and they believe that Professor Christensen's theories will help them execute their mission in a much more effective and sustainable way, making a much larger impact on their community.
Professor Christensen agreed: "Managers will be much more successfully innovative if they take this course. If they don’t take the course, either they have to try to be successfully innovative by trial and error or listen to opinions of where the market is going. But there is no data that can guide [them] as [they] look into the future. Having a theory to guide you gives a tremendous advantage.”
The Power of Collective Learning
One might argue that with so many copies in print and the tremendous growth of online retailers like Amazon, Professor Christensen's books would be able to reach many more people, and thus be the vehicle to scaling his theories. But a book cannot capture the power of collective learning, particularly when the theories are needed by a team aiming to execute on difficult strategic change.
Professor Christensen is cognizant that when someone reads his book, they don’t always describe his theories in the best way. And then, like a game of telephone, the theories become distorted and lose their effectiveness as each person tells the next.
As he said, “I thought of myself as writing to millions of people, but I have realized that’s the wrong way to frame things. Because what I write is consumed individually by individual people who have a book or an article…everybody else on the team didn’t learn that way of thinking about the problem. Your readers are your resellers of the ideas; [and through] the process of selling and reselling, the idea just loses its momentum.”
Group Dynamics
Disruptive Strategy is designed with a strong peer learning structure. Organizations are broken into teams who meet regularly to discuss what they've learned and how it applies to them and their unique strategic challenges. By creating this small group dynamic, participants of the course are not only motivated to engage, but all have the same experience and, by the end, speak the same language.
“The ideas are consumed by a group, and that’s when you come up with a new idea," said Professor Christensen. "There’s a whole cadre of people who understand the same concepts, [have] the same language and, together, can teach everyone else [with] much more fidelity…and a consistent lens.”
We, too, believe that by utilizing our online platform and the technologies that are available to us, Professor Christensen's timeless theories will have their maximum impact. We look forward to helping companies far and wide refine their strategies and implement innovative thinking.