Leveraging Disruption to Jumpstart Your Company

To claim the lead in today’s competitive marketplace, you need to leverage disruptive innovation to jumpstart your company down a path towards radical change. Most industries today are experiencing innovation sparked by radical change and disruption in the business environment. These changes and disruptions cause economic shifts that allow new, innovative and forward-thinking companies to enter the market. Established companies see this as the impetus to leverage disruption and radical change to jumpstart their company.

How to Identify Disruption

You can create value by paying attention to disrupters like the following list. Ask yourself what you can use as the source of innovation to bring about radical change. Think about these as you consider your strategy:

• Technology. Technology is perhaps the most obvious source of innovation today. How can you use emerging technology both inside and outside your industry and company in a proprietary way to create an advantage?
• Business models. Pay attention to other business models that you can adapt to your specific challenges to help you deliver radical improvements. Look for business models that could drive profit growth by radically changing the way you do business. New business models can help you expand your business in new areas and launch new products or services into new markets.
• Industry dynamics. Pay attention to industry dynamics like mergers and acquisitions that can leave holes in the marketplace. You might find areas and opportunities for your business to enter a new market or industry.
• Globalization. What happens in other parts of the world can impact how you do business. If you have access to international people, information, materials, or even capital, how can you use that to your advantage? Are new markets being created globally that open opportunities or threats you need to address?

Turn Disruptive Changes Into Innovative Ideas

Innovative entrepreneurs today look for patterns and ideas at the intersection of markets and trends, and industries and emerging technologies. They look for the disruption that will turn a stable industry upside down and how companies could compete with them. While listening to customers is imperative, so is educating the marketplace to new approaches. Successful businesses narrow their many ideas and opportunities into a potential challenge that addresses a compelling problem for customers who can and will pay for a solution.

Here are the guidelines to help you turn disruptive changes into innovative ideas:

• Listen to and learn from your market. Focus first on a problem, not a solution. Listen to current customers and find those who are unaware they have a problem. Remember what Henry Ford said about the automobile: “If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said, ‘Faster horses.'”
• Broaden your perspective. Beyond local trends, find global ones that portend a significant or revolutionary shift in customer behavior. This shift could be through business models or emerging technologies and even within or outside your industry.
• Look for disruptive people. Find people with broad perspectives on what is a disruptive opportunity. Together, analyze disruptive trends in technology, business models, industry dynamics, and globalization discussed earlier.
• Distill ideas for further investigation. Working together, narrow your ideas down to what you feel, as a team, will be the most disruptive opportunity you can leverage to boost your company’s growth. It must create value for you, your customers, your stakeholders, partners, and others involved. Then rank your ideas and choose the best.
• Turn ideas into opportunities. Develop a business plan that highlights both short- and long-term strategies. Then define your product market positioning at entry and what capabilities and resources you need.
• Carry out your plan. A promising opportunity without action is merely a dream. Manage risk by identifying key assumptions and uncertainties in your business plan. Then implement your business plan to reduce uncertainties while building your business. This action step is similar to an established company entering new and uncharted markets.

Disruptive shifts generate some of the best opportunities. Those who succeed know where to look, how to interpret the intersection of trends and technologies, and how to manage uncertainty. Leverage these ideas to turbocharge your marketing and sales results this year.

KEO Marketing, an award-winning Phoenix marketing agency, uses innovative and disruptive marketing strategies to create winning campaigns for our clients. If you are ready to boost your marketing potential through innovative and proven marketing techniques, contact KEO Marketing today for a complimentary consultation.