...especially for today's students. Computers offer a way to customize instruction and allow students to learn in the way they are best wired to process information, in the style that conforms to them, and at a pace that matches their own. Computer-based learning on a large scale is also less expensive than the current labor-intensive system and could solve the financial dilemmas facing public schools.

For all these reasons and more, taxpayers, philanthropies, and corporations have spent more than $60 billion to equip schools with computers in just the last two decades. And yet the machines have made hardly any impact. As Stanford professor Larry Cuban has documented, computers have merely sustained how schools already operate. Computers typically sit quietly, unused, in computer labs and in the back of classrooms. True, students do research on the Internet; they type up reports using word processing programs; they might even construct multimedia presentations with them. Teachers sometimes use them to present content. And schools teach computer skills. But computers have not fundamentally transformed the way learning is accomplished or how the classroom operates. Computers do not deliver instruction. The teacher is still at the center of the classroom. And research shows that students who have access to computers in school don't necessarily perform better on standardized exams.

That schools have gotten little back from their investment in technology should come as no surprise. Virtually every organization does the same thing schools have done when implementing an innovation. An organization's natural instinct is to cram the innovation into its existing operating model to sustain what it already does. This is the predictable course, the logical course--and the wrong course.

The way to implement an innovation so that it will transform an organization is to implement it disruptively--not by using it to compete against the existing paradigm and serve existing customers, but to let it compete against "non-consumption," where the alternative is nothing at all.

The Disruptive Innovation Theory

To convey what we mean, we first need to explain what disruption is. In every market, there are two trajectories: the pace at which technology improves and a slower pace at which customers can utilize the improvements. Customers' needs tend to be relatively stable over time, whereas technology improves at a much faster rate. Products and services that are initially not good enough for the typical customer ultimately pack in more features and functions than customers can use.

We call innovations that sustain the leading companies' trajectory in an industry sustaining innovations. Some are dramatic breakthroughs, while others are routine. Airplanes that fly farther, computers that process faster, and televisions with incrementally or dramatically clearer images are all sustaining innovations. Importantly, it does not matter how technologically challenging the innovation is. As long as the innovation helps the leaders make better products that they can sell for better profits to their best customers, they figure out a way to do it.

On occasion, however, we see a disruptive innovation. A disruptive innovation is not a breakthrough improvement. Instead of sustaining the leading companies' place in the original market, it disrupts that trajectory by offering a product or service that actually is not as good as what companies are already selling. Because the disruptive innovation is not as good as the existing product or service, the customers in the original market cannot use it. Instead, the disruptive innovation extends its benefits to people who, for one reason or another, are unable to consume the original product, so-called non-consumers. Disruptive innovations tend to...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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