Most ‘Disruptive’ Business Ideas Aren’t Disruptive. This 1-Minute Test Reveals Which Ones Are
Test a growth move by asking what an incumbent must sacrifice to match it. The answer shows whether your advantage can survive once competitors respond.
EXPERT OPINION BY BRUCE ECKFELDT, INC. 5000 CEO AND STRATEGIC BUSINESS COACH @BECKFELDT
I sit in a lot of strategy sessions where a founder describes a move as disruptive, and I’ve started asking one follow-up that nobody enjoys:
Which of your moves could a market leader erase? And what would it cost the leader to try?
It isn’t a trick question–just one that should be asked before the budget is committed.
The answer usually changes what the room decides to do next.
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More than a decade ago, Andrew A. King and Baljir Baatartogtokh, tested the 77 cases Clayton Christensen used to build the theory of disruptive innovation, and published their findings in the MIT Sloan Management Review in 2015. The two researchers found that only seven cases contained all four elements the theory requires. The authors didn’t conclude that the theory was wrong. They concluded that people were applying it far beyond its original definition.
Founders now routinely use disruption to describe ambition. But ambition alone doesn’t tell a company where to compete or how to defend its position. A more useful test takes about a minute.
1. Historians identify disruption after it happens.
Disruption is a retrospective label. It describes what happened to an industry once the winner is obvious and the losers have filed for bankruptcy. That makes the concept useful for teaching, but less useful for deciding what to do next.
Source: www.inc.com
