“If you had invented Facebook, you would have invented Facebook”

This line spoken by the Mark Zuckerberg character in The Social Network is not only (I think) the best in the film, but a brilliant expression of some of the key issues in disruptive innovation.

The line is addressed to the Winkelvoss twins who claimed that Facebook was their idea, that Zuckerberg was contracted to develop it for them and that they therefore were owed a huge slice of its enormous value.

It came back to me a couple of weeks ago, when the twins lost their appeal over the size of their out-of-court settlement with Zuckerberg. The judge summed up in a line more legalese, less Hollywood than that above:“The Winklevosses are not the first parties bested by a competitor who then seek to gain through litigation what they were unable to achieve in the marketplace.”

I think The Social Network is actually a great case study in disruptive innovation (while happening to also be an entertaining film). Here are some of the things it shows:

Having the idea isn’t enough. How many great ideas have you had in the bath which years later you see coming to market? When this happens to me, I normally think “wow I thought of that, someone’s actually gone and done it”, but then I’m not litigious by nature. The execution of the idea is what creates the change.

The social and technological conditions need to be ripe. You often hear the phrase ‘ahead of its time’ as an explanation for failure. It’s quite a good explanation – ideas which exist without the right social or cultural architecture are unlikely to get taken up. But you can create that, or choose conditions which will allow development.

In the case of Facebook they deliberately grew through focusing initially on university campuses. In college populations there are already connections between people, being ‘popular’ is important, people want to see what others are up to (is there a place where gossip is more rife than on a university campus?) and there are techno-savvy users who could adopt it easily. It then spread out from the student population to the population at large.
Piloting is key. In the film we see earlier iterations which were deeply unpopular – one where students rated each others’ looks got Zuckerberg in trouble. But he learnt from this early version by putting it out into the world and seeing what worked and what didn’t, even if it wasn’t intentional at the time. (Facebook hadn’t been thought of at that point, but this attempt served as a pilot.)

Look to the edges. People who come up with great ideas aren’t always going to be the popular, successful people who are at the centre of the community: the Winkelvoss twins are good-looking Olympic rowers – winners in other words - whereas in the film Zuckerberg is shown as a loser (in real life he is not as unsuccessful in love as the film portrays him, but he is awkward in media appearances). Disruption can come from different parts of the business or community so don’t look in the obvious places.

Whatever you think of Facebook – a great way to keep in touch / horrible
privacy-invading corporate monster seem to be the rough ends of that
scale – it’s undeniable that it has created a change. And The Social
Network tells that story in a compelling way from which we can learn, as
we innovate for sustainability.