The Chronicle for Higher Education
October 12, 2015
After years of preaching “disruptive innovation” for higher education, one of the most visible proponents of the theory is going to try a little disrupting of his own. Michael B. Horn, a co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, stepped down on Friday as director of its education program to begin working more directly with companies in the education market.
Mr. Horn will also become principal consultant with Entangled Solutions, an arm of a San Francisco-based company that advises colleges on innovation strategies. “I want to make a deeper impact from the ground,” he said in an interview on Friday.
In the new positions, he also hopes to continue to promote Mr. Christensen’s notions of disruption — which have come under increasing criticism — in a more hands-on way. He calls disruption a “theory of competition” that can help leaders better understand what’s happening around them.
The term has been “bastardized” by Silicon Valley and venture capitalists — and overused in higher education as well, says Mr. Horn, who was a student of Mr. Christensen’s at Harvard Business School in 2005. (Later the two were co-authors.) “Every newfangled thing that comes out is framed under that guise,” he says.
But Mr. Horn insists that overuse hasn’t discredited the theory, which argues that established companies or organizations with high-priced offerings can lose out to competitors who take advantage of new technology, even if their products are of lower-quality. Mr. Horn sees it as a useful way for colleges to understand the significance of developments like low-cost, competency-based degree programs offered by Southern New Hampshire University’s College for America. “That’s classic disruption,” he says. “It looks unattractive to the mainstream.”
The theory also helps explain how for-profit colleges attracted millions of nontraditional students through the convenience of distance education, he argues. Even though the for-profit offerings weren’t necessarily cheaper, says Mr. Horn, “they were clearly just good enough.” (Of course, it could also be argued that it wasn’t for-profit colleges or other early adopters that disrupted the status quo and made distance education more acceptable to the mainstream of higher education; it was elite institutions that embraced MOOCs.)