If Harvard Business School's Clayton Christensen is right, half of all instruction will take place online within the next 10 years--and schools had better get into the online-learning market or risk losing their students to other providers. Disruptive innovation is the business idea that, every so often, a new innovation comes along that completely changes the marketplace, knocking the old market leaders from their perch and giving rise to new ones. Disruptive innovations transform products or services into something so simple that anyone can use them, creating what Christensen called "asymmetric competition." Because they take advantage of these radical innovations, new entrants to the marketplace are essentially competing against "non-consumption" -- that is, they're getting customers who didn't exist in that market before -- while the innovation continues to improve.
