An open letter to Clayton Christensen as well as colleagues and practitioners of the theories of disruptive innovation:
State agencies in Ohio responsible for primary, secondary and higher education are coming together to share the risk of exploring disruptive technologies and to shepherd the adoption of successful technologies into the mainstream. We call this group “Collective Action”, and the model of disruptive innovations is a guiding element. On behalf of the Collective Action group, I am seeking wisdom and thoughts of potential pitfalls of this approach of aggregating risk capital in a loosely-coupled organization.
We take as given that each agency and educational institution can only take on so much risk when they look at the spectrum of technological possibilities. In doing so, it is the natural inclination to listen too closely to what the customers are saying and avoid possibilities on the disruptive end of the spectrum.
The vision and mission of Collective Action (excerpted below) is to aggregate the risk of each agency and institution in pursuit of truly disruptive innovations. We think our model has to stray somewhat from that of the business world because each of our parent organizations cannot afford to spin off separate development groups that can work under different business rules — the taxpayers would likely have a field day. Collectively pooled and with a long enough leash from our parent organizations, however, we believe that we can pursue actions along the theory of disruptive innovations.
Questions:
- Have others followeda similar model of aggregating risk from different organizations under common guiding principles? We may have something to learn from those that have tried this before.
- Based on research of organizational behavior and adoption of innovation, what would be the sort of “lessons learned” that we should seek in the experiences of participants asked to join the group?
- At a fundamental level, does this plan to aggregate risk within a semi-autonomous collective fit well with the disruptive innovation theories, and is there advice to be offered to help ensure its success?
A subset of the Collective Action group are making a presentation at the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiatives summit later this month, at which we will be describing Collective Action within the framework of the disruptive innovation theories. During the session we will also offer a bibliography of materials related to the application of the theories within higher education. If you have suggestions for other resources, I would be most appreciative to hear about them.
Thank you to you, Michael Raynor, Scott Anthony, and Erik Roth for your efforts to clearly articulate your work and blazing a path for us to follow.
Sincerely,
Peter Murray
COLLECTIVE ACTION VISION: Creation of a continuum of quality education and training for Ohioans through the establishment of innovative learning technologies and strategies for their use in Ohio K-20 educational institutions.
COLLECTIVE ACTION MISSION: To foster innovation in education and training through the sharing of risk and resources needed to invoke change. “Collective Action” refers to the investment of “risk capital” in a multi-institutional collaboration by agencies and institutions of the Ohio Board of Regents, the Ohio Department of Education, and Ohio-based institutions of primary, secondary, and higher education. These professionals with the pooled resources of their organizations will explore disruptive learning technologies and learning practices with potential to transform K-20 education and training.
1 Comment
We have had some successes in building multi-system alliances with audacious and ‘disruptive’ goals using a method called “Appreciative Inquiry” in many different organizational settings. It was developed at Case Western - and one of our alumni - Chester Bowling - is a faculty memeber at OSU helping to take this way of change to organizations in Ohio. Maybe you could chat with him.
Cheers
Punya
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[...] Clayton Christensen (4) [...]
[...] Addressing the first point, with rare exceptions I don’t see institutions as organizations scaling up their technical staff to handle the raw building tasks of the kinds of services we’d like to see in a reconstituted vision of the library. I do see some evidence that progress is being made here and there, but there are no large programming shops being built to create the next ILS-equivalent. (Side note: I hereby apologize for the connotations created by the phrase “next ILS-equivalent” — that phrase makes sense to me on the surface but it causes deep shudderings in my bones.) I have come to believe, though, that tools and techniques from the open source world can be used to aggregate the capabilities resident in the distributed “libraryland” to share the risk and reward of the next ILS-equivalent (damn — I used it again). I wrote about that earlier in an open letter to adherents to Christensen’s philosophies called Aggregation of Risk in Pursuit of Disruptive Technologies (comments on that post are still welcome to as we move forward in Ohio with the concepts outline there). Also, a colleague from Ohio State and I co-authored an article for the SmartClassroom newsletter of Campus Technology about “betting your career” on open source that I think will have relevance here. The article is to be published on the 19th and I’ll post a copy on DLTJ after a seven-day embargo. ¶ [...]
[...] Establish a shared infrastructure pilot project within a cohort of institutions with something in common, with some reason to share insights or services. In Ohio, the Ohio Learning Network is sponsoring an open source testbed and more than 40 Ohio schools are evaluating a suite of open source tools. The Ohio Board of Regents has established a project called Collective Action (the open letter posted here provides some background on “Collective Action” and the concept of pooled risk) to aggregate and share open source experiences and to evaluate the viability of a shared open source (or hybrid) eLearning infrastructure. ¶ [...]
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