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Clayton M. Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor, died Thursday at 67. He had leukemia.
Christensen is best known for his academic work on "disruptive innovation," which shows how technology-driven new entrants into a market can upend the traditional leaders. He applied the theory to the industry he worked in, higher education, in a 2011 book called The Innovative University, and he gained attention (and significant pushback) for predicting in a variety of venues several years ago that as many as half of American universities would close or go bankrupt within 10 to 15 years. The gist of his argument was that online education would undermine traditional institutions' business models to the point that many won't survive.
While his original prediction was almost certainly inflated, Christensen has been praised for identifying the economic problems facing many private colleges. In April, he defended his idea in an essay in Inside Higher Ed with Michael B. Horn, though they lowered the prediction.
