3.9 Literature Review: Takeaways
The primary research uncovered an environment with drastic changes due to digital which provides diverse opportunities for simple quick and well-designed solutions.
Disruptive startups like Amazon, Facebook, WhatsApp and digital tech innovations like touchscreen, Wi-Fi made a revolution in consumer behavior and put the customer first. The traditional industries and incumbents sounded the alarm for obvious reasons and moved their services and content to the digital environment. But rules of the game in digital field turned out to be different. Customers’ behavior and preferences are constantly changing and nowadays simply to have a web-site for presenting a company in digital is not enough. Social media and open-source platforms like blogs and web-sites strengthen the customer’s position as an opinion shaper. Millennials’ values prove this.
The fundamental needs, pains and gains revolving around the customer are now being investigated with Value Proposition Canvas and Jobs To Be Done methodologies.
Startups with Lean methodology with quick iterations for testing and getting customer’s feedback have become the standard for creating a relevant digital solution in a short-term period, and likewise their advantages over incumbents were seen the true value.
Disruption enhances these practices with its multidimensional nature to use digital potential for breaking up the traditional view and creating a new value. It also explains why disruption has become a popular topic for incumbents as a way of finding a new niche for their existing businesses.
This proves disruption as an essential response amid the passage from the analogue traditional era to the digital as a tool for providing better, faster and cheaper solutions.
The research shows that it is hard to identify a disruptive startup before actual market disruption, but a startup’s disruptive potential can be assessed. In order to find the way to cultivate a startup’s disruptive potential, the following theories and techniques such as Innovator’s DNA, Strategic Intuition, Disruption by Design and others were investigated.
The results opened up disruption fingerprints like inferior position in comparison to alternatives, initially targeting small markets and the specific audiences, and other advantages such as simplicity, low price, convenience, and various different factors that create the opportunity for disruption:
- Scarcity
- Default incumbent’s management behavior
- Incumbent’s human nature
A disruptive mindset depends on creative skills and cognitive thinking. It turns out that this can be cultivated with the help of relevant behavior techniques such as questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting.
- Disruption became multidimensional and a necessary action for opening opportunities for customers in the digital era.
- Disruptive innovations are powerful because they create abundance out of scarcity.
- Startup as a domain has more advantages to drive disruptive solution than incumbents.
- Disruptive innovation is a major, and perhaps the most important, economic driver of growth.
- Identifying high-value jobs that the customer needs to do that are under-served in the current market, and have the potential to create new markets to compete against non-consumption, is the most important beginning point for any company that wishes to create a disruptive innovation.
- Knowing the unique value proposition that a product can serve better than any other is the key ingredient in designing a disruptive strategy.
- Creative thinking has turned out to be more real and achievable due to certain basic techniques rather than startup development that can take years.
- Disruptive potential can be assessed and disruptive thinking can be cultivated.
