The word “disruptive” has now surpassed being a buzzword. In fact, it is now applied to just about everything for emphasis. In its incarnation it started out as “Disruptive Innovation” is aptly described by Wikipedia in the following terms; “a disruptive innovation is an innovation that helps create a new market and value network, and eventually disrupts an existing market and value network (over a few years or decades), displacing an earlier technology. The term is used in business and technology literature to describe innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically first by designing for a different set of consumers in a new market and later by lowering prices in the existing market.”
The term “disruptive innovation” was coined by Professor, Clayton Christensen in his book The Innovator’s dilemma. The most widely used variation of this term today is “disruptive technology” and how about disruptive entrepreneur used by Richard Branson.
In no particular order, here is list of 5 disruptive innovative and technology companies that have had a huge impact on the industries in which they serve.
- Yahoo, AOL and a host of other providers: gave the general public a way to find items and create an e-mail address through the cloud. Google came around and took over that space. Today, there is no other search engine on earth that comes close to its dominance.
- RIM/Blackberry: was a pioneer in its heyday, one of the first to offer e-mail through a mobile phone. It had a tremendous success, albeit solely relying on business customers. Apple came out with the iPhone and marketed its product to all demographics not just the business community-it has not looked back ever since.
- BlockBuster: consumers were tired of getting “penny pinched” for late fees. In comes Netflix with cloud-based TV shows and movies, the rest is history.
- Uber: at best it’s still in an infancy stage and getting a lot of pushback from the establishment. Innovators and disrupters usually do. Its business model is that of a match maker, matching a driver/car with a customer looking for a ride and taking a percentage of the fare for providing the service. Disruptive? Absolutely!
- Face book: Took what MySpace did and expanded it. Enough said.In describing the make up of entrepreneurs, Richard Branson makes the case they should be disruptive because “disruptive is all about risk-taking, trusting your intuition and rejecting the way things are supposed to be.”
So what’s going to be the next disruptive innovation in 2015? Who knows? Either way, it’s probably going to be a combination of surprise and excitement from proponents of change and, the usual pushback, from those who always resist change.
