Disruption Is Not a Strategy

Pure Market Innovation For businesses that were once cash-only, Square provides credit card processing. Square was founded in 2009 and used a new combination of technologies to solve a problem, but it wasn't the technological innovation that Square used. Uber's technologies weren't new in 2009. They could have launched ten years ago. When it came t... See more

Disruption Clayton Christensen defines disruption in his classic book The Innovator's Dilemma. Disruptive technologies are cheaper than existing ones, perform poorly under dominant standards, but are superior in a way existing markets do not need. During his research, new players repeatedly disrupted the market by introducing smaller disk drives wi... See more

Some other factors to take into consideration as you form strategies:

Entrepreneurial Strategy There are four things an entrepreneur needs: a good idea, a good team, a good product, and a good business model. Interviewing customers, assessing the market, building a MVP, and iterating are all tactics. In the long run, how do we dominate a significant market? In the short term, entrepreneurs tend to focus on a large ma... See more

Pure Technology Innovation An excellent innovation thought experiment is the development of biomedical businesses because they eliminate a primary innovation dimension. In a two-dimensional space of companies, each point represents a problem. Technology is the x-axis, and problems are the y-axis. Innovative companies match technology to unsolved pr... See more

Disruption as a strategy sucks If you read Christensen's book and want to start a company, what would you do? Christensen's theory cannot be used to create disruptive companies. While millions of people have read The Innovator's Dilemma, Christensen's theory is descriptive rather than prescriptive. Disruptions are apparent, but you don't know until... See more