The technological innovations of the last thirty years have led society to an inevitable consequence: the permanent transformation of our lifestyles. To cope with these upheavals, companies need to implement innovation strategies. These are mainly influenced by disruption. How do we define this concept and what are the methods to deal with disruption in business? Schoolab tells you all about disruption!
Understanding innovation and disruption in business
Where does the concept of disruption come from?
The concept of disruption is to bring a significant improvement in usage through a service or product that did not exist before. Jean-Marie Dru, co-founder of the communication agency BDDP, defines this concept for the first time and even trademarks it. Clay Christensen, a professor at Harvard American University, theorizes the concept of disruptive innovation, also known as disruptive innovation, in 1995. He explained at the time that disruption was a growth tool based on innovation and used by companies with limited resources.
How has disruption affected businesses?
Companies with limited resources of yesteryear have become today’s successful startups. There are no longer any examples of disruption that have become school cases thanks to the transformation of a market established as a result of an innovation: Uber and its platform for connecting private drivers with customers gave birth to the concept of uberisation or else Netflix’s hypersegmented strategy of content initially targeted at a niche has shaken up the audiovisual entertainment industry.
Businesses and corporations : how to react and prevent disruption ?
What are the strategies to take disruption?
“The best way to deal with disruption is to be proactive in innovation,” explains Etienne Gatti, Head of New Business at Schoolab. According to him, one should not seek to avoid disruption, but rather to accept and adapt to it. Above all, the challenge for companies in the face of disruption will be to understand their core business and identify the needs of their users to create relevant offers. “The challenge of disruption is to always be relevant to its users, to be always viable so that they continue to buy your products or services,” he says.
Different ways to innovate as a result of disruption
Depending on the type of business and market, different innovation strategies will be effective: there is radical innovation in creating new products, which is often opposed to incremental innovation that is equivalent to improving a product or existing service. Some also talk about frugal innovation, it is the idea of using minimum budgets as intelligently as possible to best adapt its innovation process.
These 10 innovation methods will help you survive the disruption
Train your employees for innovation
By offering personalized training in innovation and digitalization, you help your teams develop a mindset that helps them identify what is wrong and constantly strive to improve the business.
Explore top innovation hub and innovation centers with a Learning Expedition
Take your executive committee to discover disruptive innovations in Silicon Valley, San Francisco or Europe’s innovation hubs so they can soak up innovations seen elsewhere.
Define an innovation strategy against current emerging disruptive innovations
This will help you balance your portfolio of innovations with short-term and long-term projects through incremental innovation.
Promote intrapreneurship
Develop the entrepreneurial spirit and mentality of your employees in-house through masterclasses or reverse mentoring workshops to make them intrapreneurs.
Adopting new methods
Agile methodologies, lean startup or lean management will help you to have a more user-centric approach to understanding their needs
Working with startups
Collaborating startups and large groups on common issues helps to define the issues in order to focus your approach on users.
Open an innovation lab
The establishment of an innovation lab will help you to bring together the innovation ecosystem around you by offering places to host coworking offices in Paris or team buildings and seminars.
Testing new products and build your own disruptive innovation
Help your teams launch new products through programs such as CPi, which is launching an innovative product with talented schools and students.
Learning by doing and failing
You can observe the market through industry analyses, benchmarks or marketing forecasts but the most important thing will be to know how to execute. You need to test and launch prototypes to learn from them.
Experiencing the future
Identify your innovation potential to deal with disruption by doing an audit with Schoolab, for effective advice on innovation and driving change. Are you tired of reading reports that predict the future? Experience it!
