We’ve become used to praising research for being “disruptive”.
I hear colleagues doing it, and I’ve done so myself. We use this word because it’s entered the vocabulary of academia from the world of business and management. It comes from business guru Clayton M. Christensen’s 1997 book The Innovator’s Dilemma. The word “disruption” is often used to loosely refer to digital technologies that have revolutionised markets, such as Uber’s impact on the taxicab business.
But the word itself has a precise technical meaning. Christensen argued that established companies who listened to their customers made incremental improvements to their products, aiming at existing markets. But this focus on “sustaining” innovation made market incumbents vulnerable to the threat of disruptive innovation. Disruption happens when competitors bypass the needs of established customers, and instead appeal to marginal or emerging markets with products that may be less profitable for the moment, and which lack features appealing to mainstream markets, but which have other advantages such as lower price, simplicity, and convenience.
Once disruptive technologies are established – at least according to Christiansen – they soon become competitive with established products. The disruptive market entrant overthrows the incumbents, who have failed, ironically, by being attentive to their most important customers.
Disruptive universities?
Although The Innovator’s Dilemma focussed on hard disc drives for computers, Christensen’s account of disruption covered a wide range of technologies, including motorbikes and mechanical excavators. In 2011, he also extended his big idea to higher education teaching in The Innovative University, which prophesied that online learning would offer cheaper degrees to an emerging market of price-conscious students, and without the unnecessary features offered by incumbents (like Harvard), such as specialist teachers, postgraduate degrees, research-active staff on long-term contracts, and summer vacation.
Christiansen’s vision of the disruptive university has been controversial for many reasons. For instance, it seems to rely on – rather than overthrow – incumbent providers, who are needed for a steady supply of unemployed and desperate postdocs. But the word disruption is at least being used in its strict technical sense in this context.
One might expect the same rigour when academics, as peer reviewers of grant proposals and publications, commend work as disruptive, elevating it above incremental research. Academics are, after all, known for precision, even pedantry, in their use of specialist terms.
But this impression is misleading. The use of the word disruption to commend research proposals and outputs is unwarranted. There is no such thing as disruptive research, whatever we may pretend as academics.
Emerging markets
Disruption in the knowledge economy requires a marginal or new market that can find advantage in foregoing certain features of the knowledge that is currently purchased from incumbent suppliers by their core markets. Who are these marginal purchasers? They certainly aren’t the governments, businesses, and charitable foundations who currently buy knowledge from universities.
As much as they may promote the jargon of disruption, these buyers are an established core market. They want customary features such as peer review, research integrity, and methods that are ethical and responsible. These features bring costs: in time, money, and risk of partial or non-delivery (“we don’t know”, “that won’t work”, “further research is required”, and so on). Moreover, these purchasers continue to add costly new features to the knowledge they purchase, such as improved research culture and better career development for research staff.
Can we imagine a truly marginal or emerging market in the knowledge economy? One possibility might be crowdfunded research, where the public can directly purchase knowledge without the expense and hassle of pre-award gatekeeping. But this market seems likely to remain marginal, except perhaps for inexpensive projects where academics might bypass established funders.
We can also think of wealthier purchasers such as political parties, businesses and pressure groups, who might want to buy knowledge that suits their aspirations and ideologies, and which can be knocked out more quickly, particularly if the answer is known is advance – and one needn’t worry too much about ethics, research integrity, sustainability, and other superfluous features.
I stress that these are my attempts to imagine disruptive research: there may be better ways of realising the model, and proponents of the concept are of course free to suggest some. But I for one can’t conceive of a model of disruptive research that the main purchasers would want to buy, nor that universities would wish to supply. The “features” that must be given up aren’t inessentials, like a hard drive with lots of memory, a powerful engine in a motorbike, or a big bucket on a mechanical excavator. They are in fact the essence of research knowledge in any reasonable view – certainly in any view that you would find in an editorial board or a peer-review panel.
The pretence
Grant that there is no such thing as disruptive research. Could one defend the use of the word disruptive as a loose synonym for “highly creative” or “revolutionary”? The term can of course be used this way. But there is, after all, no need to do so, and the word could be quietly retired from our professional vocabulary. So a puzzle remains: why do colleagues who might fight tooth and nail over terms such as “intersectional” or “participatory” persist in their misuse of the adjective “disruptive”?
One explanation is that the word offers obeisance to the hard-nosed worlds of business and the state, who hold a higher place in the great chain of being.
This explanation in my view is true but offers only a partial answer. The word disruption has a more significant, more harmful job to do, as we collude in the pretence that it has some rigorous application to the knowledge economy. If we said openly that excellent research had to bring about the revolutionary downfall of pre-existing work, then we would be more easily conscious of the silliness of what we said. The hyped expectations would be more obvious. Scientists would balk at the expectation to be a Darwin or Einstein. Social scientists and humanists would protest (they often have) that the template of revolutionary overthrow does not at all fit their disciplines.
There is of course some speculation in my explanation. But the practical conclusion is more robust. Stop using the word disruptive as a marker of research quality unless you are prepared to use the distinct technical sense that originates in Christensen’s work. If you are ready to do so, then explain and rigorously defend the application of the term to research produced by universities in the knowledge economy.
This article is a companion piece to Disruption, transformation and silos: medical humanities and the management gurus, published on the same day in the journal Medical Humanities.
