Harvard Business School’s HBX Formally Launches First Course

By Tim Dhoul Updated Jul 23, 2019

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Introduction
HBS professor keen to reach a wider audience

Clayton Christensen behind first HBX Courses offering

Harvard Business School’s (HBS) online learning arm, HBX, has turned to one of HBS’s biggest faculty names for the formal launch of its first course.

‘Disruptive Strategy with Clayton Christensen’, a certificate program for organizational, rather than individual, use is the first official offering from HBX Courses. However, over the next year, HBS hopes to add three to five courses to its portfolio, with corporate finance, digital business and decision-making flagged up as topics it plans to pursue in the online format.

As the coiner of the term 'disruptive innovation' and author of the influential book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen is one of Harvard Business School’s most recognizable faculty members and currently teaches a second-year elective in HBS’s MBA program entitled ‘Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise’.

HBS professor keen to reach a wider audience

Christensen has said that the chief attraction in developing a course for HBX was the opportunity the format presents to share his ideas with a wider audience. Indeed, ‘Disruptive Strategy’ has already held a preliminary run, achieving an 85% completion rate among roughly 400 participants representing 25 firms. The course, said to require between two and three hours per week over five to ten weeks, is now targeting senior leaders with strategic responsibilities.

“Disruptive Strategy offers decision makers a compass, not a roadmap -- a guiding theory of disruption and innovation that provides a tremendous advantage in finding the way to success in a world where change has never been more rapid and the demands on managers have never been greater,” Christensen said in a press release for HBX.

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Tim Dhoul

Tim is a writer with a background in consumer journalism and charity communications. He trained as a journalist in the UK and holds degrees in history (BA) and Latin American studies (MA).