week 8

Disruptive Innovation

Video Transcript

Jon Steinberg: One disruptive innovation I'll talk about is the food industry. And even in recent months we've seen this big move to plantbased diets. We've seen two incredible companies, Impossible Meat and Beyond Meat that have created plant-based alternatives to burgers, they've made plant burgers. This promises to completely redesign the food industry; that we won't do as much animal raising. We'll do more plant raising and we'll do more production of these plant-based alternatives. So all around us, even something as simple as the hamburger faces the kind of disruption that we've talked about in this lesson.

For this week's HGTE, view the Live Lesson short clip and read the short excerpt from Joseph Schumpeter.

· Live Lesson - Disruptive InnovationLinks to an external site.

TranscriptLinks to an external site.

"Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy are much more than a prognosis of capitalism's future. It is also a sparkling defense of capitalism on the grounds that capitalism sparks entrepreneurship. Indeed, Schumpeter was among the first to lay out a clear concept of entrepreneurship. He distinguished inventions from the entrepreneur's innovations. Schumpeter pointed out that entrepreneurs innovate not just by figuring out how to use inventions but also by introducing new means of production, new products, and new forms of organization. These innovations, he argued, take just as much skill and daring as does the process of invention."

—Joseph Schumpeter 

Innovation by the entrepreneur, argued Schumpeter, leads to gales of "creative destruction" as innovations cause old inventories, ideas, technologies, skills, and equipment to become obsolete. The question is not "how capitalism administers existing structures,…[but] how it creates and destroys them." This creative destruction, he believed, causes continuous progress and improves the standards of living for everyone."  Joseph Alois Schumpeter, 1883-1950Links to an external site.  

Answer the following question(s) in a 1 page (minimum) paper:

1. Describe at least one innovation in the industry in which you work that you think will be a disruptor.