Saturday 28 April 2007

Word of the day

Todays's word is fast history. Thank you to Leni Mayo, who says that the word was invented by Clay Christensen, who also devised the concept of disruptive innovation. A related concept encountered yesterday (at the Wikipedia thing) was Randall Straw's idea that we are living dog years, at least in the technological sphere - every year is seven normal years. Think about it.

2 comments:

Blogitato said...

Derek:

Good to see you on Friday and nice to catch up with your blog. Particularly like wordoftheday (was that a runtogether?)

Anonymous said...

Christensen credits Kim Clark with coining the term "fast history". Quoting from the introduction to the “The Innovators Dilemna":

The first two chapters recount in some detail the history of the disk drive industry, where the saga of "good-companies-hitting-hard-times" has been played out over and over again. This industry is an ideal field for studying failure because rich data about it exist and because, in the words of Harvard Business School Dean Kim B. Clark, it is "fast history".

In just a few years, market segments, companies, and technologies have emerged, matured, and declined. Only twice in the six times that new architectural technologies have emerged in this field has the industry's dominant firm maintained it's lead in the subsequent generation.

Christensen’s subject in “The Innovators Dilemna” (1997) is disruptive innovation, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_technology