Innovation We Don't Talk About

Innovation isn't always beneficial. Viruses innovate constantly to get past our bodies' defense mechanisms. War is a major catalyst for innovation, often in ways to maim or kill people more effectively. But those are the more extreme cases.

There is a more subtle range of innovations that aren't beneficial, and companies engage in them constantly. Think of them as Defensive Innovations, a missing complement to the Sustaining and Disruptive Innovations that Clayton Christensen wrote in his 1997 classic, The Innovator's Dilemma.

Sustaining vs defensive innovations

One of Christensen's case studies is the steam-shovel industry, whose major player was the Bucyrus-Erie Company, founded in 1880. Sustaining innovations are the ways companies make their offers smaller lighter faster better cheaper. In Bucyrus-Erie's case, the major goal of innovations was to lift bigger loads.

Their disruptors showed up with hydraulic shovels, which in their earliest days couldn't lift much and were not as reliable as steam shovels. They looked like fragile toys, and Bucyrus's customers weren't interested. So why worry?

Because hindsight is 20/20, we know that hydraulic shovels ate Bucyrus-Erie's lunch.

This pattern has repeated in industry after industry. But it ignores

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