Are General Electric and Wal-Mart really not Game Changers?

When I listened to HBS podcast, I found this interesting discussion, which is the conversation of HBS podcast host and Bill Taylor, who is an adjunct professor at Babson College and a former associate editor of Harvard Business Review. He has a article on the HBS blog: Memo to Andy Grove: General Electric and Wal-Mart Aren't Game Changers, which is inspired by Andy Grove's Think Disruptive. Andy Grove served as C.E.O. of Intel from 1987 to 1998 and helped usher in the modern computing industry.

Bill actually argued with Andy's idea of big companies. such as GE and Wal-Mart should try some disruptive innovations and go for some undiscovered new field, like what Apple did with its iPod and iTunes, which Andy called "Cross-boundary disruptive, XBD". Andy thought why can't these big corporations be disruptive innovative and take a great advantage of that, instead of waiting for small start-ups to innovate some products or services to shake the industry and transform the market? Bill supposed that first, big corporations only go for disruptive innovation when they have no way to go and facing a situation of either change or out, which Bill called "near-death experience. Second, big corporations are urging for sustaining their prosperities by concentrating on their core competency rather than totally risking themselves by jumping into a unfamiliar market. Besides that, he also suggested that disruptive innovation is not quite suitable for big corporations because of their characteristics; however, big corporations could still seek innovations by a step by step method. He talks more in the audio clip.

It's a very interesting topic for me. One of the courses that I'm taking now is "The Innovation Process, Developing New Products and Services". And the very first topic that we were taking about is disruptive innovation. When reading these two articles and listening to the audio, some questions came to my mind...Is disruptive innovation only from start-ups? Can big companies be a game changer? I'm looking forward to your thoughts and feedback!