Outliers Lurk Before They Leap

Enter the black swan

At ballet rehearsal:

Director: Everything is going smoothly, the four cygnets do their triddle-traddle across the stage, nice contrast with da-dah! Entrance of you as Odile, the black swan.

Svetlana: Very metaphorical.

Director: The black swan was already a metaphor for the unexpected event caused by an outlier. Tchaikovsky put it in his ballet, and Joseph Schumpeter may have been thinking “black swan” when he proposed “creative destruction.” Nassim Nicholas Taleb extended it to history, science, finance and technology and then Clayton Christensen called it by another name, “disruptive innovation” referring mainly to technology.

Svetlana: So the story of Swan Lake is a metaphor for business?

Director: Not yet, but someone’s bound to latch onto it.

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Voice-over

For a short film on "Disruptive Innovation" go here

http://youtu.be/itEn46Pcq_Y

What more can we say?

Art foreshadows science. 
Outliers lurk before they leap. 

Destructive Creation: Sputnik to WWW

Beep-Beep-Beep 

Disruptive innovation and creative destruction: In 1957, the Russians launched Sputnik 1.

Nikita: That worried the Americans! It threatened their defence system. If Russian rockets could put up a satellite, then their ICBMs were a threat to the U.S.

Hank: So the Americans set up DARPA and one of the things that did was to make a nationwide network of computers so they could communicate even if one area was bombed.

Nikita: Bones of the internet. Trickledown from military technology to civilian technology.

Hank: Trickledown? This was destructive creation affecting everything: from warfare to culture.

Nikita: You mean creative destruction?

Hank: I just thought destructive creation had more impact.

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Voice-over

Sometimes a breakthrough in one field has an unexpected effect in another field.  Online newspapers displace daily paper deliveries. In this case the beep-beep-beep of Sputnik’s technology heralded massive disruptive innovation. Rocket science jump-starts information communication technology.

Of course the internet didn't just piggyback on Sputnik. See a short film, Internet Pioneers,  at http://youtu.be/cttRglPZ7d8

…

Ukuleles as disruptive technology

Bill and George talk about unemployment in times of disruption.
George: Turbulent times.
Bill: Chaotic, even random. I mean, I’ve been to 16 job interviews and nothing, but Jack, you know, Jack?
George: The guitarist?
Bill: The same, he goes to a club week or two back, and he plays there and gets talking to a boss kind who says, “I saw you on YouTube, you want a job?”
George: A job? As a guitarist?
Bill: Teaching ukulele. To the unemployed.
George: Wha - ? That’s a jump.
Bill: Disruptive. Ukuleles are disruptive. Like Skype disrupted telephone companies. Jack says ukuleles are the disrupting technology that are going to challenge guitars.
George: Ukuleles? A disruptive technology?
Bill: Why not? They fit the pattern. They’re cheap, they’re small. Even Warren Buffet plays one. And he says they are disruptive. Here.
George: But Warren Buffet isn’t exactly unemployed.

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Voice-over
Disruptive technology, or disruptive innovations, as Clayton Christensen renamed his concept, offer many examples. Desktop printers disrupted the copy shop industry, or online news and blogs disrupted the newspaper industry, or digital cameras disrupted the film industry. So by extending the Christensen logic to a conclusion, you can argue that something small and cheap (ukulele) coming along disrupts something bigger and more expensive (guitar). And Warren is doing a great job of buffing up the image of the ukulele.
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