I finally got around to reading through a great report jointly published by the Center for American Progress and the Innosight Institute. Disrupting College: How Disruptive Innovation Can Deliver Quality and Affordability to Postsecondary Education was published in February of last year and was authored by Clayton Christensen, Michael Horn, Louis Caldera and Louis Soares. For those of you that enjoy anything written by Clayton Christensen and team, this is a must read and addresses an important topic. However, I do believe the report glosses over a key job that colleges and universities are hired to perform. That job is to provide an environment where students gain wisdom through the college experience,  a critical piece to the transformation to adulthood. It is far from clear how that job is or will be disrupted. However, if and when an enabling technology begins addressing that job even feebly, the pace of disruption will accelerate tremendously and all but the most prestigious colleges and universities will be overwhelmed.  

Any time someone mentions ‘disruptive technology’ I immediately re-register the numerous wisdom nuggets that come from Clayton Christensen’s seminal book The Innovator’s Dilemma and its more instructional sequel The Innovator’s Solution.  Of particular relevance here is Christensen’s mantra to focus on the circumstance and the job to be done rather than the customer.  What exactly is the job to be done? Are you helping the customer do their job better?  Are you factoring the entirety of the job?  Are you asking the customer to change their job? 

The last of these questions is a doozy.  In many cases, and quite often it seems where LiDAR technology is involved, the customer is being asked to change their job in significant ways.  From personal experience, this is a huge challenge, especially with governmental organizations.  As Pip Coburn’s The Change Function articulates, those customers will only act when the pain of adoption is less than the level of their crisis.  Companies with emerging technology products, no matter how stellar their performance metrics, must focus relentlessly on minimizing the pain of adoption while being leery of circumstances where the customer’s sense of urgency is limited.