The Disruptive Voice

The value of and necessity for an organization to innovate its business model is rarely disputed in discussions of how to best survive in today’s rapidly changing economy, yet in an odd paradox, there is no standard definition in management thinking of what a business model is (or — as our research has taught us is equally if not more important — isn’t). In this episode of the Disruptive Voice, senior researcher Tom Bartman shares with us a number of insights that can be gained about an organization and its potential to successfully innovate its business model by applying Professor Christensen’s framework to the organization’s assets and activities.

“It’s a funny feeling to find yourself talking about JP Morgan and calling them 'low-end', but such is the nature of disruptive innovation: as a theory of competition, the labels it employs are relative, not absolute. In the credit card industry, American Express is the undisputed incumbent, leaving JP Morgan to be labeled as the low-end disruptor with their Chase Sapphire credit card, as noted by JD/MBA students Joe Costa (2016) and Jeff Cui (2017) in their final paper for BSSE, Clay Christensen’s course at the Harvard Business School.

Moringa is recognized as a miracle tree across the tropics worldwide for its nutritional, healing, and economic value, but farmers in Ghana lacked the processing capability to capitalize on this treasure. Enter MoringaConnect: co-founders Emily Cunningham and Kwami Williams have come together to build a portfolio of companies designed to help smallholder farmers realize their full potential.

Minga Foods turns superfood moringa into tea or a powder supplement. True Moringa harnesses the natural oils in moringa seeds to create superior cosmetic products.

In this episode, Cunningham and Williams talk about how they are unknowingly using the theories of disruptive innovation to build a company that we hope and believe will help smallholder farmers across Williams’ native Ghana rise out of poverty.

Launched at the end 2009 to bring payment processing to small businesses previously unserved by the incumbents, Square has grown to offer ancillary services to their 2M small business customers, and as such, has aptly been described as the operating system for small businesses. Square Capital, a lending platform, is one example of such a service: it leverages Square’s proprietary data to offer quick cash loans to its customers as well as provide a mechanism for repayment.

Professor Derek van Bever is joined by second year HBS students Caroline Anastasi and Lyndsey Billings in this episode of the Disruptive Voice to talk about what theory would suggest about Square’s latest move, and how the theories of BSSE (Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise) gave them a new perspective on how Square grew to become one of the first unicorns to IPO, and what they are doing to sustain their early success.

Nigerian law mandates that students must attend school for nine years, but almost one out of every three primary age children is out of school, and roughly one out of four junior secondary age children is out of school. The reasons for this range widely — from economic reasons (though education is free, books/uniforms are not; families often need child labor) to supply issues (schools are prohibitively far; often inadequately staffed) — but the effect is the same: in the language of disruption theory, over 10M primary and secondary students are left as nonconsumers of education.

Michael B. Horn, education expert, long-time collaborator with Clay Christensen (and, full disclosure: my husband) joins Efosa Ojomo and I in this episode of The Disruptive Voice to frame this mass nonconsumption of education as an opportunity to innovate a legacy, educational system to better serve the needs of all Nigerians in today’s day and age.