When Disruptive Innovation Gets Disrupted

Apr 04, 2014 | Anthony Mills

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Why The Right Foundation Can Make Or Break Your Ability to Breakthrough

Imagine the following scenario.   Your organization has conceived the perfect idea for a new product innovation.   In fact, it will be the most disruptive innovation in this product category in decades.   The technology is there and you have line of sight to executing it... or so you think.

Six, nine, even twelve months into technical development, you come to a very problematic realization.   It goes like this... while the technology to implement the disruptive innovation exists and integrating that technology in and of itself is clearly achievable, doing so creates major new hurdles arising from inherent system interactions with your other embedded technologies.   In other words, the new technology being plugged in has to play well with the older technologies surrounding it.   As most of us perhaps know, encountering technical hurdles like this is to be expected.   In fact, this probably would not be that innovative of an idea if it did not create certain technical hurdles.   But here's the problem... while your organization should   have the technical foundation to address these hurdles, it doesn't.   Not even with its outside partners.

Ouch.

At this point, one is probably asking why this is.   The answer is because this business has failed to establish a clear structure and process for institutionalizing its technical knowledge, resulting in painful gaps in its ability to execute... gaps that should not exist.   In other words, it simply has not built a broad technical foundation that is accessible across the business.   As a result, its ability to execute new innovations like this is severely handicapped.

Not true you think.   It is true.   It must be a very poorly managed company you think.   Not necessarily so.   I have witnessed this firsthand more times than once, even within some of the world's largest and most respected organizations (but I won't name names).   The fact is it happens somewhere nearly every day.   But it doesn't have to.

The moral of the story is simply this... at least when it comes to product and service level innovations that are technology-dependent, in order to be able to jump on opportunities when they present themselves (as in when new ideas arise for disruptive innovations), technology-based companies must first prepare the foundation for innovation.   That foundation is built in several ways.   First, it requires acquiring and developing top-level technical talent to carry out the work.   Second, it requires acquiring and/or developing the foundational know-how for each and every technology, component, subsystem, and system in your products.   Third, and most importantly, it requires creating a well-thought-out and well-executed organizational infrastructure and process that captures, owns, and manages the application of core technologies across the portfolio.   This last element is the key linchpin that ties together everything else.   Without it, having the smartest people and the best products won't do you much good... eventually you will be left in the lurch.   In contrast, having this foundation makes technology adoption and implementation very efficient and very effective, meaning you can pivot quickly.   Moreover, using it to manage the evolution of your technology further bridges the gap into entirely new technologies.   It is the bridge from the present to the future.   Then, when the day does arrive to implement a disruptive new idea, you will be well prepared to take on the inevitable system challenges that get thrown in the way.   You will not stall out.

I have seen this one thing make the difference between being able to bring a disruptive innovation to market and not being able to.   It is a make or break deal if an organization is to be a market leader through technology innovation.   When developing your broader innovation strategy, this is one factor (of many) that you must give careful consideration to.

One helpful tool here is the innovation maturity audit. This is an assessment which gauges whether this is an area of strength or weakness for your business and provides guidance on how to rectify it should it prove to be a weakness.   Such audits often pay for themselves many times over by helping companies know how to focus their innovation management efforts.

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