Disruptive is the new black
22 July 2009
I can remember my mother returning from a grade five parent-teacher meeting in a purple-faced rage because all my teachers had told her that I was a ‘disruptive influence'.
Wind the clock forward 40 years and today the pinnacle of business is the individual who proposes disruptive innovation.
Disruptive technologies are the ones that completely realign business principles and consumer behaviour, and are responsible for today's accelerating rate of technological change.
Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen quotes the examples of the mobile phone, which dramatically impacted the fixed-line telcos and digital photography. It sent sales of camera film plummeting and caused Kodak to change its whole business model.
“Smaller companies are more likely to be disruptive innovators”
E-commerce has stolen much of the show from bricks-and-mortar retail outlets with internet marketing, online transaction processing, supply chain management and electronic funds transfer. This creates a more level playing field for SMBs to compete with larger companies.
Unfortunately, disruptive technologies are unpredictable and generally arrive from improbable directions. They usually involve creative, left field input from disruptive innovators; generally people who are not tolerated and are personally uncomfortable in conventional business environments.
Disruptive innovators rarely blossom in established business structures, because their ideas do not initially appear to represent a worthwhile opportunity. Middle managers in larger companies are usually more comfortable with predictable, reliable, sustaining technologies. They know their markets and want to capitalise on the value of that knowledge.
They don't want to be distracted by risky "maybes".
Smaller companies are more likely to be disruptive innovators, but they can also adapt more quickly to the arrival of disruptive technologies. Smaller firms integrated social networking websites into their customer relationship management activities long before many larger firms even became familiar with the word ‘Facebook'.
This all sounds excellent in theory, but lately I have found many smaller businesses taking a more circumspect attitude to change. Is it because small business is inherently conservative? Has the financial collapse frightened them into the malaise of risk aversion?
Christensen believes that the best way for big organisations to harness the potential of disruptive innovations is to set up (or buy) separate ‘spin-off organisations' that can behave as if they are small and nimble. Such spin-offs, however, need to have a very different culture from their parents; they need to get excited about small markets and have a much higher tolerance of failure.
The challenge here is if bigger businesses start acting like smaller businesses in the traditional SMB stamping ground. So the best plan of attack for us SMBs: always be on the look out for disruptive technologies and disruptive ways of doing business.
Had my mum allowed me to remain ‘disruptive', things would have been different. Of course, Mum's retort is, "Sure things would have been different; you would have been writing this article from jail!" #
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