DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION: A FUTURIST AND KEYNOTE SPEAKER’S GUIDE

Given what the best disruptive innovation speakers and futurists have to say, it’s apparent that the concept speaks to a term coined by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen to describe innovations that disrupt and eventually displace established markets, products, or firms by being simpler, more accessible, and often cheaper. You may ask, though: How do you spot it out there in the wild, let alone fast-changing and ever-evolving geographies, regulatory environments, and business markets? It’s a fine question to considering given the state of the world at the moment after all. Per the world’s best best disruptive innovation speakers, singular characteristics of the phenomenon might be as follows…

• Game-changing shifts often originate in low-end or new-market footholds that are overlooked or ignored by established industry leaders. For instance, early personal computers were not powerful enough to compete with mainframes and minicomputers, but improved over time to displace them.
• Major paradigm shifts tend to be cheaper, simpler, smaller, and more convenient to use than existing solutions, making them accessible to new customer segments. The minimills that disrupted the steel industry are an example.
• You’ll often see big leaps driven by enabling technologies that emerge and allow a reimagining of the value proposition in a market, or so disruptive innovation speakers suggest. Smartphones leveraging mobile internet were a disruptive innovation, for instance.
• New developments gradually improve until they are able to meet the requirements of the mass market and now challenge established market leaders. Digital cameras followed this path.
• Big tidal waves change the bases of competition and redefine performance metrics, often deprioritizing attributes that existing market leaders used to compete. Cloud computing did this by making storage and processing power on-demand utilities.
• Per many disruptive innovation speakers, these happenings reshape entire industries, displacing some established firms, forcing others to adapt, and creating space for new entrants. By way of illustration, picture Uber’s impact on taxis, Netflix on Blockbuster, and Amazon on retail.

The way to think about it, we suppose, is that disruptive innovation revolutionizes industries through new technologies, business models or innovations that create new markets and value networks that displace existing firms and products.