Disruptive Innovation Drives Business Reinvention
To truly innovate or reinvent, a business needs to create something that is completely different but people realize they need once they see it.
Some of you may know that I operate a business called Reinventionist that helps businesses (and individuals) reinvent themselves.
I started it because a) I have reinvented myself many times, so I thought I could provide some advice to others and b) we’re in a world of rapid change and companies and people are more tuned to it and c) reinvention is becoming more common today.
People change jobs because they want to do something different; they change locations because they feel new ones will give them a new perspective and a fresh start; companies change how they do business because they want to move in different directions.
But change isn’t reinvention. Reinvention is much deeper.
That’s why I try to explain that reinvention is a process of innovation, and innovation isn’t simple. Sure, you can tweak something, approaching it slightly differently, or delivering it in a way you never delivered it before. That’s called incremental innovation.
Under this process, if you’re a business, you may open up a new market, adopt a different production system, or make a refinement on your product.
If you’re an individual, you may vary something so that it creates a slightly different you -- reshaping your body and improving your health through exercise, for example.
Reinvention is a different kind of innovation, one closer to what’s called 'disruptive innovation.' For companies this means combining two (or more) things, finding a commonality between them, stripping away everything from them that isn’t relevant to the combo, and coming up with something brand new.
The iPhone wasn’t something that involved a simple change, or appeared out of the ether like some kind of mental lightning bolt.
It was a combination of wireless telephone technology and extreme user-centered design. The result was something the world had never seen before -- a disruptive innovation that created an entirely new market and upturned an entire industry.
But, at its core, it was a reinvention of the mobile phone into something completely different.
And that difference came about because the iPhone developers -- Steve Jobs may have spearheaded it, but many others contributed to it -- had a purpose in mind.
They wanted to turn the mobile phone into a mirror experience of the computer, but a computer that was much simpler to use. They wanted to bring mobile-device computing to the masses, a bold purpose indeed.
Similarly, anyone attempting to reinvent themselves or their company must also have a big, honking, overriding purpose in mind. That purpose needs to be so obvious or intuitive that people -- ie customers -- will want to share it.
How can your company create something brand new? More importantly, how can it create something brand new that people need and want once they discover it exists?
This is what really matters. Not change, not innovation, but innovative reinvention that resonates with other people.
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yes and no
Submitted by Tony Wanless on Wed, 2011-11-09 14:45.Hi Rick:
Thanks for the LI tip. I'm surprised I haven't found it already.
Since innovation was my consulting speciality at one time, I'm very aware of disruptive innovation -- and an advocate for it. Generally, as a rebel and overall believer in upsetting the status quo, my view is that if it's not disrupting something, what's the point.
However, I recognize that not everybody is capable of disruptive innovation, for various reasons, or should be disruptive. Obviously, everybody can't be disrupting, or you'd have complete anarchy. So I tend to suggest something between incremental and disruptive for most companies.
Re the iPhone and the whole i family, it might not replace the computer but it has certainly taken over many of its main functions, such as email, search, and other information functions. I agree: This allows the computer to do far more difficult tasks such as analysis, planning, etc. For example, right now I'm in the midst of mind-mapping a complex process. I could never do that on my smart phone or tablet (although, who knows, maybe one day when I'm gone, it may be possible).
Thanks for responding.
Tony
Yes and no
Submitted by rick_mueller on Tue, 2011-11-08 08:56.Tony - kudos on effective verbalizing of some valuable insights. Indeed, your reinvention concept is a cousin of Disruptive Innovation, in that Disruptive Innovation (usually a recombination of existing technology to serve un(der)served demand) operates through a business model which is different than the one used to provide the currently served market (thus reinvented), which is probably the reason that incumbents have such a difficult (if not impossible) time Disrupting themselves.
.
I would beg to differ (but only slightly) on your analysis of the iPhone. The iPhone did not move the entire computer over to the hip-mounted platform - only the part (communication and interactive apps) that people use the most. The PC will not die, of course, but with the functions that most people use it for having been moved to a preferred platform in this manner, it's loss of dominance is a foregone conclusion - just as you said in other words.
If you care to, you'd be welcome to stop in at the Disruptive Innovation forum at LinkedIn to join us for further discussion on this and related matters.
Rick Mueller
http://www.linkedin.com/in/decisionscience