No-one realistically sets out to create "a Google". People set out to solve a problem. Sometimes that problem turns out to fuel vast business, sometimes not. You can guess at the size, but sometimes you're going to be wrong (hello Twitter).
You can aim to replace a business, but it's near impossible to do it because you know what the future of that thing will be (hello Windows Mobile). Even ARM didn't know smartphones were going to be a thing, at the scale they are. ARM ate Intel's lunch, not by going after smartphones, but by making processors designed to work with virtually no power. Smartphones just happened to come along and need that.
You can't intend to be disruptive. You can aim to become a big business, but that's out-competing, not disrupting, and they're not the same (hello Snapchat). The market tells you you were disruptive after the fact.
That might save some confusion :)
And sure it doesn't guarrantee anything, but it increases your chances of disruption.
And with that, you still need to build a strategy and find barriers to entry. because (a)companies are more prepared towards disruptive innovation today , and (b)if you don't have good barriers to entry, once you become a threat, the incumbent will copy you.
but lots of people unrealistically set out to create "a Google" and some of them succeed. Who never would have if they had had a realistic goal.
my goals are completely unrealistic. most people with such goals fail completely.
If Google can manage them usefully, those points are clearly not virtually infinite. (Otherwise, you're diluting the meaning of the word.)
One addition - the answer to the question why 'disruption' became so popular should include that it is so ego stroking.
He claims that "I’m sure what the presenter of the slide was getting at was Clayton Christensen’s definition of disruption from his classic book The Innovator’s Dilemma. ".
He then goes on to say (talking about Square and Uber) that "neither of these companies were disruptive in The Innovator’s Dilemma sense". However, I'd be surprised if the presenter wasn't thinking precisely of people like Uber and the type of "disruption" they've brought to the taxi industry.
So, if they are thinking of Uber, and if Uber's disruption isn't the sort being talked about in the Innovators dilemma, then I suspect they weren't thinking of Christensen’s definition at all.
I'm not sure why disruption has to be less functional - it just needs to be tackling the root problem (and often redefining what that root problem is) in a different way to the incumbent.
Meh, every single startup I've seen in the past 25 years has claimed that they are tackling their problem differently than their competitors in some way. If this is what disruption means, then it's the quintessential distinction without a difference. It's the entrepreneurs' equivalent of a VC saying "we add value." A waste of pixels. And if that's the entire content of your strategy--you think being different is all the strategy you need because, "disruptive"--then chances are you're cooked.
Just to be clear, I do agree with your general tone of the article, it's just that your Uber part made me cringe.
What I am questioning is the idea that there's only one way to disrupt an industry - to be cheaper and in some way subpar compared to the incumbent. You seem to be suggesting that the taxi industry hasn't been disrupted by Uber, because it doesn't align with one person's definition of what disruption looks like. And I don't really understand that. There's clearly been huge disruption there.
Something similar has been said of Marxism, in that it's an interesting way to think about what has come before, but has no grounding when it tries to talk about what should happen in the future.
Clayton Christensens "innovators dilemma" isn't a book about how to disrupt, but how disruption happens.
The problem with a large part of the newspeak in the startup community is that it has become too formulaic.
10 things, how you, why you, how to.
I avoid these articles like the plague as they have nothing to do with running a startup.
They're just for SEO anyways. I've been trying to learn more about marketing lately, and one of the biggest issues I've run into is that almost all the articles about marketing are marketing materials themselves.
My point is just that market insights doesn't come on formula. You can't read a book and learn about marketing. You can go out and do it or surround you with people who have experience doing it.
Sure you can learn a little here and there. But hardly anything that will make your company make it compared to those who didn't.
It's a great thing to have and maybe something that you can't plan for.
