On stage, disruptive innovation helps makes sense of the world. Here’s why?
“Why am I here”, I ask gazing into the audience. I’m not a celeb. I’m not on TV and my social media count isn’t anything to write home about. I do disruptive things.
My host Prof Wilson, and co-panelist are in-the-moment. Wilson is a 4x Linkedin Top Voice and a brand guru. He opens the event playing bass to Toots & The Maytals — “54–46 That’s My Number”.
Mariah is a top influencer and the first hijab model for a global HM campaign. She will deliver truth nuggets, like how she netted a cool $4000 for a photo.
Attention is a precious currency and a declining one. It demands a good reasons why you’ll be seated in the audience. Why am I here? Perhaps because implicitly I’d relay to people this.
Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.
The quote belongs to that great writer James Baldwin who was unpacking what motivates writers to write. His idea of not writing was unthinkable.
He knew he had something, but it was nothing if he could not endure the passion and rejects he would face, the hurt he would endure, and the lurking prejudice. He didn’t court it, but it came.
Endurance reminds me of the following:
Luke Perry, one of the Stars of the phenomenal 80s teen show “90210” said he auditioned 256 times before his first job. J.K Rowling’s rejections are now legendary. The world’s biggest African superstar, no not Burnaboy, but back in the day, Fela Kuti (sitting in my car as went to get a bite to eat) symbolised endurance. And what about Children’s Laureate Malorie Blackman OBE in this feature on the BBC Arts programme Imagine.
Many of us may relate to these stories about endurance. I do media and creative things. The idea of not doing different things fills me with dread. The most clocked up feedback I get from those I work under is, ‘it’s difficult to place you’. It has downsides.
Doing different things, like writing, requires endurance. I don’t yearn to endure, and I can’t think of any educational institute that teaches it. Yet I’ve learned how to deliver it to MA students, alongside a theory of (innovation) disruption based on my own background that goes something like this.
FUTURE
I always have thought, and always am thinking about stories and the future. Working alone, and competing against CNN, Newsweek et al, I became the first British winner of one of the US’ major coveted award in Innovation in Journalism. US judges from leading media said that what I’d built “foreshadowed the future”.
I built a non-linear story form for streaming, and based on the rubik cube which played out different stories according to the sequence it was activated. Profiled on Apple’s website, I’d three times be invited to their store to explain new innovations, such as the Outernet, Metaverse ( here for Norway presentation, 2007) and Cinema Journalism.
We’re living those innovations now. (In years to come the Guardian would win the Batten Award). I’m onto the new future! (see video below).
PAST
For life stories, I’ve found myself in strange places, from foster care as a child, before being sent to Ghana and boarding school, to later relocating to Apartheid South Africa and interviewing Nelson Mandela, and reporting on his inauguration for the BBC.
There was that time when I was Heavyweight boxer Lennox Lewis’ filmmaker for his fight with Tyson, barged into an intelligence meeting which included government and CIA heads, sat down, and no one questioned me. Or ran out of air 50m below the sea trying to find a ship wreck when reporting for BBC World on British and Turkish Naval exercises led by a descendant of the commander of WWI forces.
PRESENT
I was at the forefront of the training UK print journalists into transforming their content into the digital and joining the multimedia age. I continue training hundreds of students and groups ( across the world) to do the same.
In all I do I champion tech, difference and collaborating to place a focus on Black and brown media talent with projects like The Leader’s List — an exhibition of leading TV producers. And in co-establishing a new hybrid academic/media journal “Representology” to provide an outlet for varied voices.
James Baldwin wrote
When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway
Like writing, which Baldwin acknowledged was a painful process, creative work can be painful and the bid to do simple and innovation is weighted with risks and expectancy, so garnering support is welcome.
For a joyous period in my career I was one of the artist-in-residence at the Southbank Centre. Sometimes a member of the public would walk unknowingly into our offices, stop, gaze and then ask — “what are you lot doing?” Once they caught me intensely rubbing my temple. In three days time I was due to deliver a video for a classical performance marking Obama’s presidency. Three days! I’d barely started.
I’ve been fortunate to have had support from several figures and outfits for my work, such as the Department for Digital, Culture Media & Sport for our national project, and HRH.
Or being featured in several academic books, The Economist, Sunday Times, The Evening Standard as the group to watch in 2000, and an influential magazine with Stormzy on the front cover profiling the most influential Ghanaians in the UK.
And several professional figures from film, and news like Jon Snow, whom I was one of his producers.
STORY
Why am I here? At the event I spoke at I gave a dotted history of challenges and change that frame my past. Generally some groups endure more than others. To make ground relies on disruptive innovation. The theory to which I’m alluding is akin to art. It’s personalised but selfless. There’s a greater purpose to how it impacts people.
By themselves disruption and innovation are well framed.
I know disruption: slews of carers, parents trying their best to make ends meet; from one moment in London to the next living in a village in central Ghana.
In one year in Ghana my father’s assets were confiscated by the military government. We had little to eat, and lived off just rice and oil for months. Innovation was my alter ego in these conditions. Survive seemed to the message. In my career path disruption takes on new meaning.
Disruption and innovation together as a business theory form a new etymology that challenges the status quo whilst inviting different thinking to benefit the many in new markets. It’s generally undertaken by outsiders, small groups and start-ups seeing a gap in existing environments that benefit many from the bottom up.
The western fathers of the theory from 1995 are Clayton M. Christensen et al. However, you could argue Japanese Kiichiro Toyoda (mid 1920s) who created the Toyota Car and the spirit of monozukuri (making things) had an insight.
In my career I’ve been in three epochal disruptive innovation vortexes.
- Channel One — Thirty youngsters in 1994 who revolutionised the UK’s TV industry by pioneering Do-it-all-yourself-media e.g. video journalism, and working online.
- Creating one of the UK’s first video magazines in 2005 — which won the Knight Batten Award, from working in dotcoms.
- 2016 onwards, spearheading university Story lab programmes exploring newer media e.g. VR and flattening disciplines, with an emphasises on systems and design thinking.
Anyone can call their innovation a disruptive driving change, but not all disruptions qualify for the reference according to Christensen, if they cater mainly for elites in current markets. This article in the Harvard Business Review provides a wider picture. Still ripe for innovation disruption, Christensen adds, is education and online learning.
But disruptive innovation, as it stands, could do with further framing in a post 2019 world. Take Climate Change (CC). It’s being challenged by new thinking forwarding the idea of Climate Justice, because of sadly CC’s top down corporate approach. Disruptive innovation as a theory is in danger of being that which is largely practiced by those who disrupt, with benefits for the few, ignoring the cultural needs of diverse groups.
Disruptive diverse innovation then in a nutshell is why I’m here today. The idea that the efforts of my host and other guest constitute a platform to unfurl new narratives, which in part, paves the way to challenging dominate ideas and stories. These act as bread crumbs for wider innovation.
If you come from a place of inertia, one crisis after another, the frustration of making do, tempered by a lack of opportunities that can weigh on your mind, then there are windows to enter, and ways of being resilient in endurance.
Dr David Dunkley Gyimah was invited to Prof Jonathan Wilson’s event at Regent’s University celebrating Black History Month, alongside Mariah Idrissi. Thanks to Prof Jonathan, staff, and Regent’s University, and Nizar Tackie ( official photographer).
