Sunday, December 10, 2006

Disruption...

Not sure where this comes from so apologies. It was appended to another note...but worthy of circulating nonetheless...

“Disruptive Innovation for Social Change”

Description:

Countries, organizations, and individuals around the globe spend aggressively to solve social problems, but these efforts often fail to deliver. Misdirected investment is the primary reason for that failure. Most of the money earmarked for social initiatives goes to organizations that are structured to support specific groups of recipients, often with sophisticated solutions. Such organizations rarely reach the broader populations that could be served by simpler alternatives. There is, however, an effective way to get to those underserved populations. The authors call it "catalytic innovation."

Based on Clayton Christensen's disruptive-innovation model, catalytic innovations challenge organizational incumbents by offering simpler, good-enough solutions aimed at underserved groups. Unlike disruptive innovations, though, catalytic innovations are focused on creating social change. Catalytic innovators are defined by five distinct qualities.

First, they create social change through scaling and replication. Second, they meet a need that is either overserved (that is, the existing solution is more complex than necessary for many people) or not served at all. Third, the products and services they offer are simpler and cheaper than alternatives, but recipients view them as good enough.

Fourth, they bring in resources in ways that initially seem unattractive to incumbents. And fifth, they are often ignored, put down, or even discouraged by existing organizations, which don't see the catalytic innovators' solutions as viable. As the authors show through examples in health care, education, and economic development, both nonprofit and for-profit groups are finding ways to create catalytic innovation that drives social change.

In this case, the traditional, overweight, vendor-soaked, underutilized, cash-burning, centralized corporate collaboration approaches clearly meet these deleterious criteria and must be avoided. When people focus on absolute value and the networks it inhabits, lofty enterprise strategies and organizational traditions often fall by the wayside.

Simultaneously these visualizations release stunning edge-based insight and offerings that are scalable, attractive, good enough, just right, innovative and highly catalytic.

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