Submitted by: Submitted by 1448850
Views: 10
Words: 5737
Pages: 23
Category: Business and Industry
Date Submitted: 09/29/2016 10:46 AM
A new kind of innovator
can wipe out incumbents
in a flash, by Larry Dowries
and Paul F. Nunes
HBR.ORG
THE BIG IDEA BIG-BANG DISRUPTION
y now any well-read executive knows the basic
playbook for saving a
business from disruptive
innovation. Nearly two
decades of management
1 research, beginning with
¡Joseph L. Bower and
Clayton M. Christensen's
1995 HBR article, "Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave," have
taught businesses to be on the lookout for upstarts
that offer cheap substitutes to their products, capture new, low-end customers, and then gradually
move upmarket to pick off higher-end customers,
too. When these disrupters appear, we've learned,
it's time to act quickly—either acquiring them or incubating a competing business that embraces their
new technology.
But the strategic model of disruptive innovation
we've all become comfortable with has a blind spot.
It assumes that disrupters start with a lower-priced,
inferior alternative that chips away at the least profitable segments, giving an incumbent business time
to start a skunkworks and develop its own nextgeneration products.
That advice hasn't been much help to navigationproduct makers like TomTom, Garmin, and Magellan. Free navigation apps, now preloaded on every
smartphone, are not only cheaper but better than
the stand-alone devices those companies sell. And
thanks to the robust platform provided by the iOS
and Android operating systems, navigation apps are
constantly improving, with new versions distributed
automatically through the cloud.
The disruption here hasn't come from competitors in the same industry or even from companies
with a remotely similar business model. Nor did
the new technology enter at the bottom of a mature
market and then follow a carefully planned march
through larger customer segments. Users made the
switch in a matter of weeks. And it wasn't just the
least profitable or "underserved" customers who
were lured away....