How can we encourage empowering innovation?

I’m a big fan of professor Clayton Christensen for more than a decade.

I even bought all the copies on the shelf of one book store and gave them to my employees to inspire them when I was running a startup. I think the actual number should have been 10 to 15 copies by the way.

Anyway I watched a youtube video which I watched similar video maybe a few years ago gain. The professor was talking about why empowering innovation was super important to society.

Let me summarize his points.

There are 3 types of innovations and only one of which can contribute to our society actually.

3 types of innovations

1. Empowering Innovation
   It must have been called disruptive innovation. These kind of innovation make things affordable and create new market with competing no consumption.
2. Sustaining Innovation
   These kind of innovation is most likely to be real technological or scientific breakthrough. Sustaining innovation make existing products or services better.
3. Efficiency Innovation
   Efficiency innovation make existing products and service more efficient in terms of cost. This tends to kill jobs.

He explained in the video in detail why only empowering innovation make a society or country wealthy. But magically all once great companies is compelled to focus on sustaining and efficiency innovation in the end.

Here’s reasons establishment focus on efficiency innovation

1. If you listen your current customers, you’re more likely to focus on sustaining innovation because current your customer want your existing products or services better.
2. If you care ROI or investors, you are almost trapped to focus on efficiency innovation because efficiency innovation is the only promised way to increase profit in a short periods of time.
3. Empowering innovation is difficult to predict. All we know is it takes time but we can not predict how much time we should wait.
   I have tried to use his theory for more than a decade to my startups but most of ideas failed, only 1 of them partially succeeded. I’m not sure even the small success was because of the theory or luck.

So I agree with his points.
I also start wondering how we can fix the problem.

Since the US has Silicon Valley, the situation is way better than other developed countries but the professor was worried even for the US.

The tactics to encourage empowering innovation

1. Make empowering innovation predictable and controllable.
   As professor Christensen says, greatest success come from empowering innovation. If attempts for empowering innovation can be predictable and controllable, many companies and startups would do it. Startups should be everything about empowering innovation, but since it’s not predictable, most investors naturally avoid it.
2. Policy
   I just think if empowering innovation is that important to societies and countries, why not incentivize empowering innovation and discourage efficiency innovation?

For the former, professor Christensen even published a book called Competing Against Luck to make empowering innovation predictable and controllable. This book is kind of how-to book for that.

I read it and the book is really really good. I even purchased 2 copies and gave them to my co founders. But I also feel we or I still need help.

Most startup founders and innovators can not use the theory well.
Because….

We need someone’s help

1. Founders are believing in their ideas strongly.
   That’s why naturally we are biased.
2. One technology or product can be disruptive to business domain A but sustainable to business domain B at the same time.
3. We have to analyze many aspects of solution like economic aspect and social aspects
4. It’s really difficult to find someone who knows well about the theory and business both. Or just finding someone who knows well about the theory is still difficult.

Understanding the abstract is okay but it’s not easy to understand the theory deeply unless you’re a big fan of the theory. I purchased more than 20 copies in my life and distributed them to my employees and co founders. but most of them didn’t quite understand theory.
I hope it’s not only me who can not use the theory correctly…

By the way when I was looking for articles or videos which the professor was talking about policy, I found an article.

In the article, professor said we should change tax law to encourage long term investment and penalize short time investment.

This sounds reasonable.

Conclusion

While policy is out of my hand, creating or joining in empowering innovator’s community may be doable. If there are such communities, please let me know. Thanks in advance.