Innovation and disruption 101 — the what, how and why?
Spotting opportunities for innovation and disruption can seem daunting at first, maybe even impossible. Looking at tech giants like Atlassian, Tesla, Amazon, and Apple (to name a few) — you wonder how these ideas came to be. Was it luck, timing or just plain genius? Coming up with an idea that solves a problem is certainly difficult. The majority of startups fail not due to low funding (although that is a factor), but because they’ve created an idea that nobody wants. So, the question is: how can you come up with an idea and confirm it is something people want? Something people didn’t know they need until you create it.
What is the difference between innovation and disruption?
Innovation is about improving an existing product and is often referred to as intrapreneurship in incumbent businesses. The big idea is to increase market share by taking into consideration a customer’s wants/feedback. Disruption is more strategic, and often changes how an industry operates, sometimes even creating new industries; these can come in the form of products, services, even business models.
Innovation is improving what is already there, disruption is using what exists to create something new and challenges established industries and business models.
How do you come up with an idea?
Start with a pain point. Think about the world around you and how you and people close to you interact with it. Have you found the process of something cumbersome, expensive and/or lengthy? Have you noticed a part of the customer journey falling through the cracks? What doesn’t work around you or is inefficient and costly? These are good starting points for you to begin spotting areas you can start finding solutions for.
Talk to people, you would be amazed at the ideas you can have by just having a conversation. When seeking to disrupt an industry, solve a business problem, or create a social innovation project, embed yourself into the industry and problem space. Most people are more than happy to discuss their knowledge, expertise and gripes.
Find, poke and prod at what doesn’t work and turn this into an opportunity for testing. You’ll quickly find out if it’s something people want, would use and pay for. If not, it doesn’t necessarily mean the idea was bad, it might just need tweaking, more customer research or you are not using it to solve the right problem.
Explore existing technology and its use cases. How are people employing technology, what are the features and functionalities of it and what industries utilise it the most? When you understand how the technology works and what it is currently used for, discovering where it can be implemented elsewhere becomes much easier. Also, don’t be afraid of combining multiple technologies to solve something, just ensure that it is necessary rather than over-complicating/over-engineering the solution.
Resources to leverage:
· Newsfeeds. Subscribe to news feeds and podcasts about your preferred industries, technology, and entrepreneurship. Here you’ll be able to hear from experts about the current state, their predictions and what they see as current and future problems. Use their knowledge to inspire you, there is nothing wrong with branching out from an idea to come up with something completely new or improve upon it.
· Keyword analysis. Using platforms such as google trends can show you in which direction trends and customers are moving and what unmet customer needs exist. Using this data, create a visual to help you discover interrelations between these keywords and trends to find potentially untapped opportunities. Don’t just explore the trends either, but also the reasoning behind them, you may just be solving a symptom rather than the actual problem!
· Read research papers. Many academics research and discover incredible things in their dissertations, but a common shortfall is the lack of foresight to patent or market these ideas. Reading through academic journals provides a lot of theoretical knowledge you can use to back your own marketable ideas. (Note that many theses are purely theoretical and/or experimental and may not have any market viability).
tl;dr
When defining an opportunity, consider and evaluate the innovation and disruption potential, target audience, the relevance for the defined target market and the related trends and technology. Don’t be afraid to experiment with your ideas, and if testing fails — find out why and pivot.
We are currently in an age where creativity, passion, experimentation, success and failure are all held in high regard; it is a time where people can become household names overnight, where an idea can transform an entire industry or even create new ones.
Be daring, be bold, go forth and conquer unto this new age, and don’t stop until you hit gold.
