Disruptive innovation has taken on a new form that deviates from the traditional model by initially entering the market as a low-cost substitute for a high-end product before gradually improving in quality and moving up the customer chain.
Instead, the innovation quickly penetrates every customer segment while outperforming competitors in terms of both price and quality from the outset. This kind of “big bang” disruption can virtually overnight destroy entire product lines.
Pay attention to the truth tellers
Your truthtellers might be easy to spot, if not accept. They could be employees working on the front lines of competition and change, far below the ranks of senior management. They might not even be your employees.
Longtime customers, venture capitalists, industry analysts, and science fiction writers may all be truth-tellers.
A different kind of product innovation
The first step in ensuring your survival is realizing how fundamentally different big-bang disruptions are from more conventional innovations. They are also more creative and seamlessly integrated with other goods and services, and they are less expensive than more traditional offerings.
Many of them take advantage of consumers’ expanding access to product information as well as their capacity to add to and share it.
The good news
Big-bang disruptions hold enormous potential for those who can quickly learn the new rules of unrestricted development, unrestrained growth, and undisciplined strategy.
Your current business may be replaced by something more dynamic, volatile, and profitable. And the transformation will occur abruptly rather than gradually. In other words, not a whimper, but a bang.
Your business is already getting disrupted right now
You can’t see big-bang disruption coming. You have no control over it. You can’t beat it.
The innovator’s disaster is a big-bang disruption. And it will continue to make executives in every industry break out into cold sweat for a long time.
The impact of big-bang disruptors is undoubtedly amplified for technology- and information-intensive businesses, but most industries are vulnerable.
The biggest challenge
The fact that big-bang innovations combine pre-existing technologies that don’t even seem related to your offerings to achieve a noticeably better value proposition poses perhaps the biggest challenge to incumbents. Big-bang disruptors might not even consider you to be a rival. They don’t approach customer needs in the same way that you do.
Most of the time, they’re just throwing something flashy in your customers’ faces in an effort to entice them to a company that is entirely unrelated to yours.
Recognizing Big-Bang Disruption
Big-bang disruptors are rewriting the rules of industry after industry—but only until the next wave of disruption arrives.
Big-bang disruptions typically have a virtually integrated supply chain rather than a vertically integrated one: they are manufactured and deployed using cloud infrastructure.
Product lifecycle: big band disruptors
A Big Bang Disruptor is identified by three features:
- Unorganized Strategy
- Unrestricted Development
- Unhindered Development.
Big Bang Disruptors do not follow the traditional market adoption model’s stages.
It’s all about making a big splash in the market.
The 12 Rules Of Big Bang Disruption
Rule 1: Talk to Your Truth-Tellers
Rule 2: Determine Your Market Entry
Rule 3: Conduct Apparent Random Market Experiments
Rule 4: Survive Catastrophic success
Rule 5: Take advantage of winner-take-all markets.
Rule 6: Establish Bullet Time
Rule 7: Plan for Saturation
Rule 8: Sell Assets Before They Turn Into Liabilities
Rule 9: Don’t Quit While You’re Ahead.
Rule 10: Get Out of Your Own Black Hole
Rule 11: Become a component of someone else.
Rule 12: Transition to a New Singularity
The four stages of big bang disruption: part 2
The Big Crunch: Big Bang disruptors will quickly implode during this phase. Growth slows down, and innovation becomes incremental at this point.
Entropy: As dying industries reach this stage, the market is prepared for the influx of the following group of disruptors.
How to identify truth-tellers
Truth tellers are frequently eccentric, and their clarity can be confused with arrogance and stubbornness. Consider Steve Jobs, as well as other technology luminaries such as Bill Gates, Alan Kay, and Mark Zuckerberg.
Slowing the disruption
Ensure that disruptors cannot profit from their inventions until you are ready to acquire them, or you can win with your own product.
Once a big-bang disruption has taken off, it’s impossible to stop it.
You can delay their profitability by lowering prices, securing long-term contracts with customers, or forming strategic alliances with advertisers and other companies critical to your competitors’ plans.
Seeing it coming
Recognizing warning signs is critical to survival. However, because early market-based experiments almost always fail, the familiar signals sent by low-end customers abandoning ship may never arrive.
You need new tools to recognize radical change coming sooner than your competitors, which means interpreting the true meaning behind seemingly random experiments.
Books And Jeff Bezos
The creator of Amazon understood that an enormous number of SKUs in a fragmented market, a small, shippable product, and a stable supply chain, with a large number of sellers being served by a small number of powerful middlemen all naturally led to e-commerce.
Books were a coldly rational choice for Bezos, and not because he had any experience in publishing. They were appropriate for the tool he desired to use.
A fast escape and a quick pivot
Senior management must face the reality that even long-successful strategies can be abruptly upended, necessitating a radical re-creation of the business.
To compete with undisciplined competitors, you must be prepared for an immediate exit from current markets and be willing to sell once-valuable assets.
A new kind of diversification
Diversification has always been a risk-mitigation strategy in cyclical industries. A diverse set of businesses is essential as industry change becomes less cyclical and more volatile.
Fujifilm, for example, has survived the digital photography transition by diversifying into other products and services ranging from nanotechnology to the production of flat-panel TVs.
The four stages of big bang disruption: part 1
The Singularity – The key element of this phase is the number of failed product experiments, which signal the impending change.
The Big Bang: Customers switch to new goods and services in place of outdated ones.
