The concept of disruptive innovation entered the mainstream some 30 years ago (Bower and Christensen, 1995) and has gained considerable traction in response to strategic and ethical imperatives. Strategically, profit seeking firms often work to find the next disruptive innovation and create new “winner takes all” scenarios. Equally, organisations seeking public benefit often frame disruption as necessary for destroying or at the very least modulating existing development paths considered to be unsustainable or unjust.
Climate change is a salient case, and one likely to require significant change to existing development patterns and pathways. This means it is likely that current ways of living, working and playing will ultimately be disrupted. It may be unpalatable to many actors but deeply engrained ways of thinking, systems and technologies which underpin everyday life such as those associated with automobility may need to be deliberately disrupted in order to achieve the kind of deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions which may ultimately be needed.
Such actions are founded on the logic that disrupting existing arrangements opens windows of opportunity to create new development paths which better meet normative needs such as for social and environmental justice, and variously labelled transitions, just transitions and sustainable transformations. By using these terms, they imply that disruptions can in some way be managed and that strategic and normative aspects of disruption can be aligned, thus offering reassurance to incumbent actors who may stand to lose from such acts of creative destruction.
We are far from convinced by these claims. First, if we let powerful incumbents play key roles in transitions then such processes may be ultimately camouflage for ‘more of the same’ narrowly defined capitalist logic. For example, the move from ICEs to EVs is not automatically socially and environmentally sustainable but suits incumbent interests and may prevent more progressive pathways centred, for example, on better public transport and more support for active travel from emerging.
Second, it is unclear whether (and how!) transitions and transformations can be managed. How do normative imperatives arise in disruptions and lead to the emergence of progressive development paths? History suggests there is no singular ’smooth’ line of development. But rather that modern societies have been built on a series of non-linear disruptions, including not uncontroversially the industrial revolution and then a series of waves of development based on various technologies, such as heavy engineering, aircraft, ICT and the internet. In many instances such disruptive processes merely followed economic logics and were not deliberately stimulated or cultivated to produce socially progressive outcomes. So we wonder if it is even possible to stimulate and intervene in disruptions to attain particular normative outcomes? And as disruption and transitions necessary challenge and disrupt the structures upon which societies and economies are built, there is the question of where requisite governance networks will be situated amid a changing and possibly challenging institutional landscape.
In closing, we are also sceptical of narratives of disruptive innovation when they fail to attend to the questions of power and (in)justice. In our collective urgency to address climate change we can be seduced by narratives promising that, following a period of post-disruption adjustment, everyone will somehow be better off. Although it is clear that inaction is not an option, it is also clear that deliberate disruption will produce winners and losers through profoundly political and, importantly, spatial processes: the externalities of disruption are often unevenly distributed in space, along with access to governance networks. Here, the pursuit of more equitable forms of disruption is complex because surprisingly little is known about where disruptions occur and how space and place inflect such processes.
To date academic outputs which seek to represent spatial aspects of transitions are founded in topographical spatial imaginaries which emphasise transition processes on a frictionless Euclidean surface. Such imaginaries tend to become unwieldy when applied to processes producing confusing terms such as ‘glocal’ and emphasise a somewhat conservative ‘top down’ structuring power. Instead we argue transverse topological spatial imaginaries are needed which situate agency in processes of deliberate disruption among a network of spatially distributed actors and attend to the actually existing power dynamics in play.
This is a joint blog post drawing on research led by Professor Matthew Cook and Dr Miguel Valdez.
Reference:
Bower, J.L. and Christensen, C.M. (1995) Disruptive technologies: catching the wave. (technological investments), Harvard business review. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, pp. 43–53. ( https://library-search.open.ac.uk/permalink/44OPN_INST/j6vapu/cdi_proquest_reports_1296475584 )
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