Abstract
This article aims to show how Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) can recognise and best respond to a disruptive innovation. A disruptive innovation creates a new business model using a new process and usually a new technology to offer a product or service with new features and/or lower cost and initially addresses a group of people who are either unserved or overserved by existing offerings. By contrast, a sustaining innovation may use the same technology, but enhance an existing business model. To illustrate this, we set out two case studies that each implement the same innovative model of work-focussed learning differently: one in an autonomous sub-unit of an HEI, while the other sought to embed the same model in existing faculty activities in another HEI. The theory of disruptive innovation (Bower and Christensen 1995) is set out and used to understand types of innovation, from sustaining to disruptive, and to identify the model of work-focussed learning as a disruptive innovation. We then used this to analyse the subsequent trajectories and different outcomes of the two case studies. Our aims then were (1) to show how disruptive innovation theory can be used to recognise different types of innovation and (2) to suggest the appropriate way to organisationally structure disruptive educational innovations as semi-autonomous enterprises. We also note potential constraints that government policy may place on HEIs attempting to respond to disruptive innovations.Keywords: disruptive innovation; business model; online distance education; organisational change; higher education(Published: 24 July 2015)Citation: Research in Learning Technology 2015, 23: 22494 - http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/rlt.v23.22494
Highlights
When planning for curriculum and business model change in universities, it is useful to be able to provide an analysis of proposed curriculum developments to distinguish those that are incremental and sustaining in nature from those which are disruptive innovations, as defined by Bower and Christensen (1995, p. 44)
We look briefly at how this same work-focussed learning model was implemented in two different institutions, each with different organisational goals. We explore their subsequent trajectories and outcomes, analyse them using disruptive innovation theory and suggest some conclusions as to how such innovations might best be handled by Higher Education Institutions (HEIs)
When considering the US Higher Education System, Christensen et al (2011) are sceptical that existing publicly funded universities will be able to take on board disruptive innovations, as they are only familiar with delivering sustaining innovations to their existing business model
Summary
When planning for curriculum and business model change in universities, it is useful to be able to provide an analysis of proposed curriculum developments to distinguish those that are incremental and sustaining in nature from those which are disruptive innovations, as defined by Bower and Christensen (1995, p. 44). When planning for curriculum and business model change in universities, it is useful to be able to provide an analysis of proposed curriculum developments to distinguish those that are incremental and sustaining in nature from those which are disruptive innovations, as defined by Bower and Christensen The preliminary aim of our analysis was to understand the kind of innovation, in terms of incremental through to disruptive, that the model of work-focussed learning exhibits in the context of Higher Education Institutions (HEI).
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