Disruptive Innovation - Making it happen in Organizations

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Authors: Sanjib Dutta, Anil Kumar Kartham
Senior Faculty Member, Faculty Associate
ICMR (IBS Center for Management Research).

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Factors That Affect Disruptive Innovation Contd...

Leveraging the Right Capabilities Contd...

3) Organizational values that are hostile to disruptive innovation: If there are rigid values in force in an organization, a separate independent unit or venture should be created to deal with innovations. Values play a crucial role in decision-making in the organization. Values are often more inflexible than resources.

They are ingrained in the minds of top executives, other managers and employees. Even the suppliers and distributors associated with a particular firm hold certain fixed values.

A new venture may be more successful than an existing one in targeting order sizes to attract better resources and utilize new opportunities. When new sales people, distributors, and retailing channels, embodying new values and ideas are employed, the chances of disruptive innovations breaking through are improved.

Bringing Simplicity and Convenience to Customers

A disruptive innovation succeeds when it brings simplicity and convenience into what the customer is doing. It must minimize the need for customers to change their lives in ways they are not inclined to do. An innovation should aim at disrupting the competitors and not the customers. In order to find what the customer is doing, observation is necessary. A popular method to know what the customer is doing is to conduct market research. But market research can mislead organizations. Customers do not always tell surveyors about what they do. It is necessary for organizations to watch the customers to know what they are doing.

Many times, innovations do not materialize due to the incompatibility of resources, processes, and values. The success of a few companies often inspires other companies to attempt innovation. But these successful companies operated under different circumstances and with different independent variables, from the organization in which disruptive innovation is being attempted. It is only the organizations that identify the variables in their unique situation, and manage them well, can succeed in disruptive innovation.

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