What Disruptive Innovators Do Differently

In his new book, Epic Disruptions: 11 Innovations That Shaped Our Modern World (Harvard Business Review Press, 2025), Scott D. Anthony looks at how disruptive innovations —including the iPhone, transistor, and disposable diapers—reshaped industries and societies. Here’s an adapted excerpt from the chapter on Julia Child. Close your eyes and think of someone who has launched a disruptive innovation that changed the world. Odds are you pictured someone like Jensen Huang from Nvidia or Sam Altman from OpenAI. Or, if you are more historically inclined, perhaps you had a vision of Henry Ford and his Model T or even further back to Johannes Gutenberg and his printing press. All fair choices, but disruptive innovators come in lots of different forms and flavors. For example, go pick up a random cookbook. Open it up. Look at how it is laid out. You likely see two columns, with the ingredients and equipment on the left side of the page, and the instructions on the right. That’s just the way cookbooks are laid out, right? Kind of. Cookbooks are laid out that way because at some specific point some specific person thought that specific layout would make the most sense. They tried it out and found out it connected with readers. Other authors mimicked it. And it became the standard. That specific person was Julia Child. She’s featured in my book Epic Disruptions. What exactly did she disrupt? Let’s say you lived in the suburbs of the United States in the 1950s. What did you do if you wanted to enjoy great French food? One option would be to drive to the nearest city and hope you could find a reasonable restaurant. If you wanted to be sure to enjoy great French food, however, you’d have to buy an airplane ticket and fly to France. In 1951, the same year that Julia Child failed her final exam at Le Cordon Bleu (she passed it on her second attempt), she met Simone Beck Fischbacher and Louisette Bertholle. Fischbacher and Bertholle were working on a book of French recipes for an American audience. Their publisher thought they needed someone with a more authentic American voice. Child agreed to join the effort. Ten years later, the trio released Mastering the Art of French Cooking. “The recipes are glorious, whether they are for a simple egg in aspic or for a fish soufflé,” wrote Craig Claiborne of The New York Times. “At a glance it is conservatively estimated that there are a thousand or more recipes in the book. All are painstakingly edited and written as if each were a masterpiece, and most of them are.” The book made it simple and affordable for people to cook great French food in their own kitchen. That’s classic disruptive innovation. The Five Disruptive Behaviors Through her illustrious career, Child demonstrated the behaviors that serve as the ingredients of successful disruption. Customer obsession. The layout with ingredients and instructions side by side is a prime example of how Child was customer obsessed. She always looked at the world through the eyes of her readers, making sure she used ingredients they could access and wrote in terms they could understand. By shopping in the stores in which her customers shopped and cooking using their ingredients, she learned that U.S. veal was less tender than French veal, its turkeys were larger, and Americans ate more broccoli than the French did. Following in Child’s footsteps is as simple as spending more time with customers, seeking to understand them better than they understand themselves. Curiosity. Child was curious, to the point of obsession. In 1953, Child was researching fish recipes. She encountered a subtle, but critical, challenge. There are 32,000 different species of fish in the world, and a fish is not a fish is not a fish. For example, a French cookbook might reference le carrelet. British English translates that into plaice. But American English translates it into sand dab, lemon dab, or lemon sole. Translating dab in an English-French dictionary would return carrelet, but also limande, calimande, and plie. The wrong translation could lead to sub-par results, impacting Child’s desire to allow people to replicate refined French cuisine in their kitchen. Child turned to French-English dictionaries and cookbooks, including one with a 26-page index of French fish and their American equivalent. She also wrote to French and American experts including those in government departments. She noted in her memoir that she received “reams and reams of information, everything you wanted to know about fish but were afraid to ask, which were firm-fleshed, which flimsy, which were saltwater, which fresh.” In the end, Mastering the Art of French Cooking had a 27-page chapter dedicated to fish with another 20 recipes sprinkled throughout the book. The path to innovation always starts with a question. Why is it done this way? How might we do it differently? Great innovators like Child question the status quo, looking for different and better ways to do things. Collaboration. Child collaborated widely, working with multiple chefs through her long career. She always sought to learn from experts in particular techniques. She brought her own perspective to these collaborations, sparking fresh, innovative ideas. One of the biggest myths of innovation is the idea of the lone inventor. Such a creature has never existed. Innovation requires a team, a village, a legion. Great innovators recognize one of the most persistent findings of the innovation literature—magic happens at intersections, where mindsets and skills collide. Going to the intersections can be as simple as picking up magazines from different fields or asking AI to take on a different persona. It’s a simple way to make magic happen. Willingness to experiment. Child was a master experimenter. While there were 1,000 or so recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, one notable absence was French bread. The challenge was that creating the distinctive crunch of a baguette seemed to require the special purpose oven in a French boulangerie. In what she called the “Great French Bread Experiment” Child and her husband Paul tried out more than 30 different approaches before determining that dropping a hot brick, stone, or metal ax-head (if you happened to have one lying around) into a pan of cold water in the bottom of the oven created a beautifully effective puff of steam. Child shows how the key to experimentation is remembering that there’s no failure when you didn’t and couldn’t know the answer beforehand. There’s only learning. Persistence. Finally, Child persisted through setbacks and struggles. For example, she, Beck, and Bertholde signed a contract in 1952 with Houghton Mifflin to produce the book. In 1958, Houghton Mifflin said the 700 pages that only covered sauces and poultry was too much, and asked for a simpler, sharper book. Child and co-authors rewrote the book. Eighteen months later, despite calling the book “culinary art,” Houghton Mifflin’s editor-in-chief Paul Brooks said it was still too dense and complicated, and declined to publish it. Thankfully, Child’s friend Avis DeVoto connected the authors to Judy Jones at Alfred Knopf, and, two years later, the book came out and was a smashing success. Child demonstrated what Carol Dweck from Stanford calls a growth mindset. She viewed setbacks as neither permanent nor as things that revealed personal limitations. Rather, she viewed them as stepping stones on the path to success. Mastering the Art of French Cooking was only the start for Child. She wrote another dozen cookbooks and became a television star through her show, The French Chef. Through it all she sought to make great cooking accessible to a broader population. “No one is born a great cook,” she wrote in her memoir. “One learns by doing. This is my invariable advice to people: Learn how to cook—try new recipes, learn from your mistakes, and above all, have fun!” The behaviors followed by Child are not particularly difficult ones. Curiosity, trial-and-error-experimentation, and willingness to persevere through failure are all common among children. It comes down to having the right mindset. Legendary disruptive innovator Steve Jobs put it well when he said, “Everything around you that you call ‘life’ was made up by people who were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.” At their core, great disruptive innovators are just like you and me. The musical Back to the Future had an earworm of a song titled “For the Dreamers,” who “never stop believing / one grain of sand becomes a pearl / a great idea can change the world / they can see what others don’t / try things other’s won’t.” Do some disruptive dreaming. Ask questions. Look at the world through the eyes of your would-be customers. Run an experiment. Try again if it doesn’t work. It sounds so modest, but those are the ingredients that change the world. Scott Anthony is the author of Epic Disruptions: 11 Innovations That Shaped Our Modern World (Harvard Business Review Press, 2025), from which this article is adapted. Buy it here

What Disruptive Innovators Do Differently

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