What social movements can learn from the ‘innovator’s dilemma’

This article What social movements can learn from the ‘innovator’s dilemma’ was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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In order to meet the dire challenges that face us, social movements are going to need new and creative strategies. We are going to need groups that are willing to escalate and take risks. And when breakthrough “movement moments” arrive, we are going to need organizations nimble and adaptive enough to jump into the fray, heighten the impact of mass mobilizations and create mechanisms to help absorb the energy created.

In considering where such innovation might come from, there is a concept that is much discussed in the business world that I think offers a useful provocation for social movements. It is called the “innovator’s dilemma.”

Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen coined this term in his influential 1997 book “The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail.” His central insight was that the very strategies that make large, established companies successful are often the same ones that prevent them from adapting to change.

Christensen observed that dominant firms tend to focus on refining their existing products for their most profitable customers. In doing so, they ignore newer, cheaper and initially inferior technologies that serve emerging markets. But over time, these upstart competitors evolve and improve. Eventually, they overtake the incumbents. And that is the dilemma: what makes dominant firms strong within the current market also makes them structurally resistant to what comes next. Big companies can do everything right from a traditional business perspective — serve their customers, maximize profits, build strong brands — and still collapse, because staying true to their current strengths can blind them to the future. 

Major innovations, in Christensen’s model, usually come from the margins. This is not because the advances are immediately superior, but because they serve a different set of emerging needs. Startup companies oriented toward new developments are willing to fail often, to pivot and to chase uncertain but promising potentials. That freedom is what lets them reimagine their industries.

In social movements, we do not have billion-dollar venture funds betting on our disruptive potential. But we do need to be just as clear-eyed about where to look for innovation, and about how our movement ecology can make space for it. If legacy organizations are structurally constrained, then we need to nurture the new actors — ones willing to fail, to iterate and to take risks that can help spark major transformations. For this reason, I believe it is worth looking in more detail at lessons we might apply from the innovator’s dilemma.

The Blockbuster story

One of the most common stories used to explain Christensen’s theory involves Blockbuster, the iconic video rental chain. I like this example because it was something I witnessed in my own life. When I was in high school in the 1990s, Blockbuster was a cultural fixture. It had thousands of stores, tens of thousands of employees, and was valued at billions of dollars. Throughout huge swaths of the United States, if you wanted to get a movie to watch at home, you drove to Blockbuster. For many people, it was a Friday night ritual.

On paper, Blockbuster should have been untouchable. If it had chosen to pivot to DVD-by-mail and then to streaming, it would have had huge advantages. But instead, a scrappy newcomer entered the scene. Netflix had no stores, no legacy systems and no late fees to defend. Yet because of this, it was able to adapt to a future that was not in physical storefronts, but in digital delivery. 

Blockbuster’s business model depended on foot traffic. The company banked on families wandering the aisles and on collecting annoying penalties from overdue returns. (God knows I paid plenty of those.) To pivot to delivery by mail or streaming would have meant destroying its own source of profit. Netflix did not have to wrestle with that choice. Because it had no major infrastructure to protect, it could be agile and adapt. 

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Ironically, Blockbuster saw the future. In 2004, it launched a streaming service. But the company could not fully commit. Investors wanted growth and shareholders wanted predictability; neither was looking for transformation. We know how the story ended. Before long, Netflix had become a household name, while Blockbuster closed its last corporate-owned store in 2014.

What seems absurd in hindsight — that this upstart would overtake a Goliath — makes perfect sense through the lens of the innovator’s dilemma. The question we need to ask as social movement builders is: how often do our own institutions resemble Blockbuster? And how are we able to create space in our social movement ecology for the Netflix-like arrivals that appear around us?

Looking at innovation in movements

The innovator’s dilemma is not without controversy. In 2014, Harvard historian Jill Lepore wrote a scathing critique of Christensen’s initial book in the New Yorker. This led to rounds of back-and-forth between his detractors and defenders of different stripes. These included contributions from critical supporters who have diverged from Christensen in their work in the field of innovation theory but retained some of his key insights. In many ways, the innovator’s dilemma was a victim of its own success: Even the book’s author agreed that “disruption” and “innovation” became corporate buzzwords that were sometimes thrown around with careless abandon. 

Nevertheless, my experience is that the idea that established organizations are rarely designed to reinvent themselves is relevant not just for markets, but for movements as well. 

When I have talked about this concept in social movement contexts, I have found that some people are skeptical of taking lessons from business-world examples, arguing that, in Audre Lorde’s words, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” While I appreciate this perspective, I am in the camp that believes that we should try to draw strategy insights from diverse sources — even including the strategies deployed by our adversaries. Moreover, when I have used the idea in trainings, I have found that it has produced stimulating and generative conversations, suggesting that it is a worthwhile framework to grapple with.

What elements of the innovator’s dilemma, then, do I believe are useful for social movements to think about?

In “This Is An Uprising,” the book I wrote with my brother Mark, we discussed numerous instances of where established and highly structured organizations were caught flat-footed during moments of mass mobilization. During the ouster of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, the upstart April 6 Youth Movement catalyzed a nationwide uprising, while the Muslim Brotherhood — with all its organizing power and deep roots — initially struggled to respond. We saw a similar pattern play out during the U.S. civil rights movement in the tension between the NAACP’s legalistic approach and the campaigns of civil resistance run by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, or SCLC. Of course, the SCLC itself, which was rooted in the structures of established churches, at times grew hesitant to ramp up its actions. It had to be prodded into bolder stances by groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC.

In each case, it was not the institution with the most resources or legitimacy that led the charge. It was the insurgent formation willing to escalate.

And this does not only pertain to mass mobilization. We have also seen it play out with the emergence of new organizing models within electoral campaigns. Notably, in the 2008 presidential race, the Obama campaign’s embrace of distributed organizing upended the Clinton machine’s centralized structure. Here again, innovation did not come from those who had the most to lose. Instead, it was propelled by outsiders.

Culture eats strategy for breakfast

I like thinking together with other organizers about the innovator’s dilemma because I believe it is a good way to explore the idea — to quote another phrase used both in the business world and outside of it — that “culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

We like to imagine that our organizations are very adaptable and able to pursue a wide range of different strategies. But, in fact, progressive groups are generally rooted in deep organizing lineages that shape how they conceive of social change and how they respond to emergent challenges. This can be a great source of strength, but it also creates limitations. After they are established, groups very quickly develop entrenched organizational cultures that — as much as any conscious decisions about strategy — will affect how they behave. Increasingly, groups become concerned with protecting and preserving what they have, rather than looking for new ways in which to create the change they seek in the world. And so an organization designed for one purpose becomes hard-pressed to act on new opportunities when they arise.

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In their classic book “Poor People’s Movements,” theorists Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward documented how, in moments of mass revolt, the instinct of established organizations is generally to rein in the energy of insurgent protest, rather than to escalate it. Piven and Cloward further argue that the “imperatives of mass-membership organizational maintenance characteristically create [a] kind of leadership” that is risk-averse and oriented toward organizational self-preservation. This is less the fault of any individual’s failure of nerve and more the product of the institutional life of the groups they have committed themselves to building.

Similarly, in 2011 veteran labor strategist Stephen Lerner wrote an important article entitled, “A New Insurgency Can Only Arise Outside the Progressive and Labor Establishment.” In it, he argued that “Unions have the money, members and capacity to organize, build and fuel a movement designed to challenge the power of the corporate elite.” And yet, in spite of the incredible dedication of members, leaders and staff, “unions are just big enough — and just connected enough to the political and economic power structure — to be constrained from leading the kinds of activities that are needed,” including campaigns of mass civil disobedience. 

The innovator’s dilemma suggests a challenging truth: that established organizations, including those on the left, can be structurally incapable of investing in the very things that can cause the greatest transformations. The same bodies that hold institutional knowledge and history may be unable to usher in the next breakthrough that is needed. That is not unique to our movements, and it is not a result of personal failings. It is inherent in organizational systems.

Responding to the dilemma

Looking at the difficulty presented by the innovator’s dilemma, how can social movements respond? The corporate world has developed a variety of strategies for addressing this challenge. These include using venture capital to fund experimental projects, acquiring start-ups, and creating autonomous units and accelerators within their organizations to pursue transformation. For social movement organizers, there is potential to build parallels to a variety of these approaches, and I believe there are many promising avenues to explore here.

However, for the purposes of this thought experiment, I want to focus on just three points that I believe are particularly relevant for movements: the need to incubate, the potential of spin-offs, and the importance of a movement ecology perspective.

First, our movements need to recognize the importance of incubation. Trying to drive innovation through legacy organizations — ones fundamentally shaped by their existing cultures, incentives and hierarchies — is a very difficult path. That is why it can pay to start fresh, with initiatives designed to find and cultivate small groups of core leaders who undertake “front-loading” processes to launch new projects with intentionally designed strategy and culture. Groups that facilitate these new experiments are called incubators. 

We need to create mechanisms to fund these incubators, knowing that many of the experiments they generate will fail, but the few that succeed could make major contributions. (As a big believer in incubation, I have personally been involved in creating two such projects: Momentum and, more recently, a new Climate Resistance Incubator. In the first case, Momentum helped spawn groups including Sunrise and IfNotNow.) 

Second, we should recognize the potential for spin-off initiatives. Established organizations do not need to be cut out of the process entirely. Although their involvement in creating new groups tends to be more limited than that of dedicated incubators, they can nevertheless have an important role in conceiving of and making possible spin-offs that advance goals aligned with their missions, but that will have organizational independence. One example of this is how 350.org also contributed to the formation of the Sunrise Movement — providing early funding and staffing support — before Sunrise then emerged as its own force. Rather than resisting new actors, established organizations can seed and nurture them as a way to bring fresh energy and ideas into the broader ecosystem.

Of course, this is rare, and it requires far-sighted vision on the part of movement leaders. But it can also come with benefits, allowing groups to be supportive of bold initiatives while also creating firewalls to protect their existing operations.

In his 2011 article, Stephen Lerner proposed such an approach in the context of organized labor: “The solution isn’t to try to defy institutional gravity by convincing people to do something they aren’t willing to do,” he wrote. “Instead, we need … to develop a movement-based organizational model that taps into and builds on union resources — both financial and organizational — but denies unions’ ‘veto power’ over campaign activities.” In doing so, unions would be able to “help set up, launch, finance and ultimately engage directly in campaigns based on their comfort level” without the projects being fatally constrained by possible concerns the larger organizations may have about exposing themselves to legal risk or burning a relationship with an employer or politician.

Finally, it is essential that we adopt a social movement ecology lens in understanding what different organizations can contribute. Creating strong movements is not a matter of finding one “right” approach to pursuing justice. Instead, it is about recognizing that different groups, coming from diverse lineages and possessing distinct theories of change, each have strengths and weaknesses that they bring to the table. Our ability to effectively leverage change depends on us appreciating what different organizations can and cannot do, allowing them to play to their strengths, and crafting complex collaborations between groups inhabiting different segments of a movement ecosystem. 

The point of incubating new groups and promoting spin-offs is not to celebrate novelty or even “innovation” for its own sake. And we do not need to adopt Silicon Valley’s profit-driven motives for wanting to shake up the status quo. The point, instead, is to recognize that new movement initiatives can play a unique role in the social change ecosystem, occupying a niche that established organizations may be unable or unwilling to fill. 

This is not to say that the work existing groups are doing does not serve a vital function, or that they might not excel in other areas. After all, the NAACP’s legal strategies proved essential in advancing civil rights and backing up mass protest movements at critical junctures. Likewise, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was ultimately much better positioned to institutionalize change and capitalize on the fall of Mubarak — at least for a time — once the upheaval was set in motion by others. Once new organizing models and campaign strategies are established, larger and more well-resourced movement structures can be key in scaling innovative practices and furthering their adoption within the ecosystem.

All that said, thinking through the innovator’s dilemma helps us to recognize the institutional reasons why our organizations and leaders can grow averse to adopting fresh approaches over time. And it can help us to build ecosystems capable of producing new pathways for experimentation, escalation and risk. If we are to succeed in spite of the odds stacked against us today and to birth a next generation of progressive strategies, I believe that taking such action will be essential.

This article What social movements can learn from the ‘innovator’s dilemma’ was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Source: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2025/11/innovators-dilemma-social-movements/