Christensen (2013) sees disruptive innovation as innovation that “helps create a new market and value network, and eventually goes on to disrupt an existing market and value network”. In some industries, you can quite clearly see incremental innovation happening over the course of a few years. In the men’s razor industry, we haven’t seen major disruption in recent years. You can see small, incremental change however - take something like the Gillette razor, with numerous small innovations over the course of years, from sensor excel to mach 3 and so on. Contrast this to very traditional industries like the hotel sector, where AirBnb (a website that allows the public to rent “spaces” like a room or even air mattress) is now seen as a major threat. In the taxi industry, Uber is doing some disrupting of its own, allowing the public to catch a lift from private drivers via a mobile app. Take Google Docs, which is challenging the office software paradigm and you can see that few industries are safe from the threat of disruptive innovation.
So how does one become disruptive? Disruptive Innovation really takes a rebellious mindset – an instinct to throw out the rulebook, discard what was there before and remake the market landscape, particularly in industries where the competition have grown complacent and innovation is lacking. Disruptive companies just tend to think and act very differently than their competitors.
Take the fascinating case of Neflix. Netflix had a ‘DVD-by-mail’ model originally, which disrupted the video rental industry. Now years later, its streaming service is disrupting the TV network industry. Netflix wants to become the “HBO of Internet TV” – and is even producing its own TV shows, like the hugely successful ‘House of Cards’. Netflix think differently than their competitors. While TV stations make you wait a week or longer for each new episode of a show, Netflix want to allow you to watch shows whenever you want. The second disruption is what they refer to as the “cord-cutting option”. At present, in order to get a channel like HBO, you must also have to pay for all the other things you don’t want on cable. Netflix wants to provide that option. Even from the limited amount of information we have on Neflix, it’s clear to see they think differently. What other company do you know that has a cultural anthropologist on staff? Particularly one employed to conduct anthropological studies on things like....people who spoil shows!
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