Tuesday, July 15, 2008

A Diagnostic for Disruptive Innovation

"A Diagnostic for Disruptive Innovation" by Scott D. Anthony, Mark W. Johnson, and Matt Eyring provides some useful guidelines to help innovators determine how an innovation might be deployed as a disruptive innovation. They offer 3 diagnostics to be considered:
  1. Customer diagnostic - assess your customers and non-customers and determine if there are major unmet needs or overserved needs that could be the basis for a disruptive innovation opportunity.
  2. Portfolio diagnostic - "This diagnostic involves looking at the technological characteristics of the innovation and at the potential business model by which the innovation might be brought to market." The goal is to find innovations in your portfolio that could be deployed disruptively to meet the needs of current and potential customers.
  3. Competitive diagnostic - are there weak spots among your competitors that would prevent them from responding effectively to your innovation? Asymmetry of competitive advantage is what it's all about.
Put all these together and you can find guidance in properly deploying innovations to have disruptive potential.

Just don't forget the role of intellectual assets in doing this - something usually left out in the literature. More on that in our upcoming publication in JPIM.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't understand what you mean by implementing an innovation disruptively.
On one of our posts on MahindraUniverse.com the writer says that innovation is the outcome of disruptive thinking which leads to an out-of-the-box solution.
(http://www.mahindrauniverse.com/mahindra_universe/2008/06/examining-the-out-of-the-box-p.html)
Do tell us what you think.

Renee Hopkins said...

Jeff, I work with Scott Anthony and Matt Eyring at Innosight...thanks for referencing their article! Scott in particular has many newer articles you might be interested in at www.innosight.com...and has just published a book, The Innovator's Guide to Growth (http://www.innovatorsguidetogrowth.com). Drop me a line if you're interested.

Thanks!
Renee Hopkins Callahan
Editor, Strategy & Innovation