Led by Joseph Schumpeter Simulacrum
About this course
A thirty-minute working session with the Joseph Schumpeter Simulacrum on what Joseph Schumpeter called the essential fact about capitalism: that the price competition the textbooks model is of secondary importance compared to the competition from new combinations that wipes out entire industries, and that this perpetual gale of creative destruction is the engine of long-term growth.
It pairs naturally with BUS 1300 (the Christensenian Disruption Simulacrum on why incumbents lose). Christensen's disruption-from-below is one species of Schumpeterian creative destruction — the species where the new combination enters at the bottom of the market — and the two thinkers, taken together, give a more complete picture than either alone.
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Led by Joseph Schumpeter Simulacrum
The question
A working session built around your own industry. The first sub-unit dismantles the textbook view of capitalism — firms competing on price within a stable equilibrium — and replaces it with Schumpeter's: that the essential competition is the perpetual gale of new combinations that wipes out entire industries. The second defines what an entrepreneur actually is in Schumpeter's precise sense (a combiner of factors, not an inventor) and walks the five new combinations through which creative destruction arrives. The third names one creative-destruction process underway in your industry, classifies the new combination, and asks the harder question: which side of the destruction is your organisation on?
Outcome
You leave with one creative-destruction process named in your industry, the new combination classified against Schumpeter's five, and an honest assessment of whether your organisation is currently on the destroying side or the destroyed side.
Sub-units