A key part of Christensen’s theory is that the incumbent players in a particular industry routinely fail to make the necessary changes to the way they do things, even when they can see the disruption occurring all around them. In almost every case, they see the disruptors as not worthy of their attention because they are operating at the low end of the market, and either don’t see that as important or are too committed to their existing business models.

Low-end competitors open up new markets

Existing players are often good at what the Harvard scholar calls “sustaining” innovation, but they are rarely good at disruptive innovation. The latter is the kind that transforms something that used to be complicated and expensive — and therefore available only to the wealthy or those with special skills — and makes it available to a much broader group of users.

So in telecom, he said, existing companies didn’t see the potential disruption from cheap flip-phones and ubiquitous cellular networks because they were too focused on large corporate customers, not individual users, and their businesses weren’t set up to take advantage of this new market:

“The flip-phone and wireless made it so affordable and accessible that people around the world could now have access to telecommunications, and in almost every part of the world, the people who were the pioneers were not the existing wire-line players because it didn’t fit their business models… I think you see this playing out in journalism too.”

Value is created in new places

Although Christensen didn’t mention them by name, the obvious low-end competitors in the media business are players like The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed — both of which started at the low end of the value chain but have been moving up steadily, a trend that Christensen’s theory also describes. The Harvard professor also made some positive comments about Forbes magazine, and what it has been able to do online compared with other traditional magazines such as Fortune and Newsweek.

“Compare, for example, Newsweek and Fortune on one side against Forbes on the next — the core business just got killed. McGraw-Hill sold Newsweek to Bloomberg for a dollar… but with Forbes, while the traditional magazine got commoditized, they’ve created different business models above and below that are really kind of interesting.”

(Note: Professor Christensen appears to be confusing Newsweek and BusinessWeek here — Bloomberg bought BusinessWeek, while Newsweek was sold for a dollar to the financier behind The Daily Beast).

The Forbes example reinforces another key point in Christensen’s description of disruption: as one layer of what technologists call “the stack” of processes that make up a business becomes commoditized, it creates value in other layers that can be captured by new players. So in journalism, Christensen says, the job of accumulating and distributing information about the world — something newspapers like the New York Times used to have a monopoly on — has become commoditized:

“As disruption occurs, it commoditizes a layer in the stack, so what used to be a high value-added activity that was very profitable and others couldn’t replicate, now becomes cheap and easy and anyone can do it. It used to be that news and information was one of those layers in the stack — no one could play that game like the New York Times… but now everyone has access to more information than they could possibly use.”

Find other jobs that news consumers want done

The key to managing that disruption, Christensen says, is to find those other value-added businesses or markets or functions — “jobs to be done,” as he calls them — that news or journalism consumers are looking for. One example, he suggests, might be taking in all of the information people are deluged by and telling them what is true and what isn’t (something mainstream media outlets often fail to do, as I tried to describe in a recent post):

“Are there jobs for which there have not yet emerged viable competitors? I’m awash in information, but I need someone who will tell me what is true, and it’s not clear that anyone has really done that job yet — the New York Times thinks they’ve nailed that, but it’s not clear to me that they have.”

Christensen also warned — as he has in the past, including in the report that he co-wrote last fall with Nieman Fellow David Skok, entitled “Breaking News” — that many existing players in the media business are trying to innovate within their traditional corporate structure, and that this almost always fails. In answer to a question about the Boston Globe, he said the approach of having a separate site called Boston.com run by a separate team was smart.

When an audience member said the site was now being run from within the Globe newsroom, however, Christensen changed his mind, saying: “Oh my gosh, really? Then put on your helmet, because it will force Boston.com to conform itself to the newsroom. That’s the way it always works, Sorry about that.” The full audio stream of the interview is available at the Nieman Journalism Lab.

The course, offered via open source learning platform edX, will be taught by Harvard law professor William Fisher III and a gaggle of teaching assistants from the school’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The 500 students who are accepted will discuss copyright issues in small groups and receive a Harvard certificate after sitting for a three-hour exam.

While online learning opportunities abound these days, this one is intriguing because it appears to combine the promise of universal access with an elite experience — online learning sites like Coursera and Udacity similarly offer classes from top-tier schools, but don’t require students to apply for acceptance or limit the number of students who can participate. The Harvard offering also represents a welcome way to expand the copyright debate beyond the legal community and entertainment industry.

See this Education Week piece for more details. Registration closes at midnight today.

(Image by col via Shutterstock)

The chart accompanies an article by Nicholas Carr, “The Library of Utopia,” in the May/June 2012 issue of the Technology Review.

Carr acknowledges that it is okay to be sort of, or extremely, confused by the DPLA. “The controversy over nomenclature points to a deeper problem confronting the nascent online library: its inability to define itself. The DPLA remains a mystery in many ways. No one knows precisely how it will operate or even what it will be.” OK, glad I’m not the only one.

The Crimson posted excerpts from a letter to library staff from University Library Director Robert C. Darnton explaining concerns: “As we understand it, the settlement contains too many potential limitations on access to and use of the books by members of the higher education community and by patrons of public libraries. The settlement provides no assurance that the prices charged for access will be reasonable, especially since the subscription services will have no real competitors [and] the scope of access to the digitized books is in various ways both limited and uncertain.

The NY Times reports that the publishing industry and some scholarly groups have opposed certain forms of open access, arguing that the free distribution could erode the quality of research and cut into subsidies that some journals provide for educational training and meetings, since open access articles would not undergo the same rigorous process of peer review that published articles do. Some even fear that smaller journals might face closure, disappearing into the cracks of increased competition between open access and larger, more profitable publications. Still, open access proponents don’t foresee the possible weakening of research ethics and quality, citing the availability of many physics journals as an example of education thriving in the free, online repository.

Update: The FAS approved the proposal tonight, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. Open access activist Peter Suber of nonprofit group Public Knowledge said the move makes Harvard the first US university to adopt an open access mandate. (Full proposal via PDF.)