Gavin Miller discusses the origins and limitations of the jargon of research disruption, and offers an alternative vocabulary better suited to the medical humanities
The greater value of ‘disruptive’ research is a canard of major UK research funders such as UKRI, Wellcome Trust and Leverhulme: disruptive, transformational discoveries are better than gap-filling, incremental research. In 2023, I attended a Wellcome Trust presentation which explained that they fund ‘Discovery Research’ in order ‘to disrupt and transform the understanding of life, health and well-being’. Their job was to help researchers make more of such ‘fundamental, blue-skies research’.
The term ‘disruption’, as used by funders, comes from The Innovator’s Dilemma by Harvard business guru Clayton M. Christensen (Christensen 1997). Christensen argued that businesses typically made incremental improvements to their products, aiming at the needs of established customers. Such ‘sustaining’ innovation was ‘disrupted’ when competitors created products that appealed primarily to marginal or new markets. Disruptive innovations did not appeal to mainstream markets, but had other features such as simplicity, convenience, lower price, and portability. Ongoing innovation allowed the disruptor to soon compete on established product features, thereby overthrowing the market incumbent. The innovator’s dilemma, for Christensen, was that incumbents struggled to pursue both sustaining and disruptive product development – the latter seemed merely unprofitable when compared with innovation for core markets.
Christensen’s central case study examined disc drives for computer storage. He argued that incumbents who focussed on mainframe storage, and particularly price per megabyte, had been disrupted, and then displaced, by innovators whose smaller drives were initially more expensive per megabyte, but which met the needs of successive emerging markets in minicomputers, PCs, and notebooks.
The disruption concept – or better, narrative – seized the imagination of the business world, leading to a vogue for disruption (Lepore 2014). The theory promised continued economic superiority for the Global North, which could prioritise disruptive innovation by supporting the creative efforts of entrepreneurial start-ups insulated from the imperatives of big business. In a later concession, Christensen proposed that even big companies could disrupt markets, so long as visionary leaders shielded in-house disruptors from short-term imperatives (Christensen and Raynor 2003).
The incorporation of universities into the neoliberal knowledge economy (Slaughter and Leslie 1997; Slaughter and Rhoades 2004) meant that the jargon of disruption soon found a home in the language of research evaluation. The opposition between disruptive and sustaining invitation was blithely mapped onto concepts borrowed from Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions (see, for instance, Park, Leahey, and Funk 2023). Disruptive innovation was equivalent to transformational work that overthrew existing scientific paradigms. Sustaining innovation was equivalent to incremental work that solved puzzles within an existing paradigm. This analogy fostered also the value judgement that disruptive or transformational knowledge was superior to its opposite, and thus of greater value to research funders, and beyond them, the economy and state. This was of course a misreading of Kuhn’s work, which offered no such evaluation, and which argued that incremental research was required anyway to identify the anomalies that would in time be resolved by scientific revolutions (Kuhn 1977).
The medical humanities have also been incorporated within this simplistic model by funders and indeed researchers. The better kind of medical humanities research is disruptive or transformational. The interdisciplinary research centre is a kind of internal start-up shielded temporarily – by visionary leaders, of course – from other financial imperatives. To value disruption implies also that the field progresses in moments of abrupt, revolutionary change, as manifest in the supposed emergence of a critical medical humanities in the 2010s from an earlier pre-critical phase.
The model seems plausible, so long as one ignores the research traditions from which it emerges. Christensen’s historiographic claim was soon though undermined by solid empirical – indeed, incremental – research which showed that his case studies used unreliable sources, ignored counter evidence and counter explanations, and were marked by confirmation bias (Lepore 2014). A re-examination of over seventy case studies from Christensen’s work showed that only seven matched his theory; the rest had different outcomes and explanations (King and Baatartogtokh 2015).
Just as importantly for the medical humanities, the concept of disruption makes little or no sense when applied to the making of knowledge, as opposed to disc drives, motorbikes, and mechanical excavators (three of Christensen’s case studies). What does it mean to disrupt knowledge production? One must offer knowledge that is less valuable to core markets, while reaching a marginal or new market that does not need the ‘features’ required by incumbent purchasers. This disruptive foothold must then be sustained and developed to displace the market incumbents.
To apply this model in any rigorous way to research funding is extremely difficult. One candidate might be crowdsourced research funding, where the public can directly fund projects without the pricey feature of gatekeeping by academic peer review (Ikkatai, McKay, and Yokoyama 2018). But this remains a very marginal practice. Governments, business, and charities – the market incumbents – show no inclination to abandon this feature, despite their celebration of disruption. Moreover, they seem keen to add in new and costly features such as improved research culture, patient and public involvement, responsible (not just ethical) research, and better career development for research staff.
When the word ‘disruption’ is used – or rather, misused – by research funders, they borrow the authority of business studies to buttress the claim that all knowledge production can be polarised into two types: disruptive or transformational research versus incremental research. The claim is ill-founded, not least with respect to the medical humanities. Kuhn’s account of scientific revolutions has never been plausibly extended to social sciences let alone the humanities (Davis 1986). In the latter, disciplines routinely operate without a single unifying disciplinary paradigm; contesting schools and theories are normal to knowledge production, not a sign of revolutionary breakdown in a paradigm.
Knowledge production in the medical humanities can be neither disruptive nor transformational. We – and more importantly, our funders – should stop using these terms.
Instead, a new vocabulary should be developed. We can concede that the disruptive (or transformative) versus incremental distinction gestures toward an interesting difference, but one that is too easily distorted into a hierarchy. One kind of research, currently mischaracterised as incremental or gap-filling work, properly has a fuller, more affirmative relationship to a body of pre-existing research. Another kind of research, currently mischaracterised as disruptive or transformational, properly has less of an affirmative relationship to a body of pre-existing research.
I propose a new metaphor for this distinction. The metaphor is I hope original, although I cannot be sure. I propose we think of this polar difference using a metaphor drawn from the language of soil horizons. At one extreme, we have ‘topsoil’ research (type A), which takes root on top of earlier layers, and promises to flourish quickly, with more certain and abundant results. At the other, we have ‘bedrock’ research (type B), which like a pioneer species such as moss or lichen, develops on previously barren bedrock, offering a layer for potential but uncertain future growth over a longer timescale.
If the medical humanities, and its funders, were to adopt this metaphor, then one could usefully distinguish between two kinds of research proposals, activities, and outputs. But one could do so without adopting mistaken models from business studies and the history of natural science, and without supposing that what flourishes in the topsoil is better or worse than what takes root on the bedrock. A prudently managed research ecosystem supports both.
Post-script
This article derives from Gavin Miller’s recent publication: ‘Disruption, transformation and silos: medical humanities and the management gurus,’ Medical Humanities, (2024, online first).
About the author
Gavin Miller is Reader in Contemporary Literature and Medical Humanities at the University of Glasgow.
References
Christensen, Clayton M. 1997. The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.
Christensen, Clayton M., and Michael E. Raynor. 2003. The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.
Davis, Murray S. 1986. “‘That’s Classic!’ The Phenomenology and Rhetoric of Successful Social Theories.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 16 (3): 285-301.
Ikkatai, Yuko, Euan McKay, and Hiromi M. Yokoyama. 2018. “Science created by crowds: a case study of science crowdfunding in Japan.” JCOM: Journal of Science Communication 17: A06.
King, Andrew A., and Baljir Baatartogtokh. 2015. “How useful is the theory of disruptive innovation?” MIT Sloan management review 57 (1): 77-90.
Kuhn, Thomas S. 1977. The essential tension: selected studies in scientific tradition and change. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lepore, Jill. 2014. “The Disruption Machine.” The New Yorker 90 (17): 30.
Park, Michael, Erin Leahey, and Russell J. Funk. 2023. “Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time.” Nature 613 (7942): 138-144.
Slaughter, Sheila, and Larry L. Leslie. 1997. Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies and the Entrepreneurial University. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Slaughter, Sheila, and Gary Rhoades. 2004. Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State and Higher Education. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
