Mark’s Blog

Harvard Business Review IdeaCast
has an interesting video regarding innovation, specifically disruptive innovation. They define disruptive innovations as products or services that enable more consumers in that market to afford and/or have the skill to use the product or service.

It was an interview with Scott Anthony, President, Innosight. An example he gave was the Nintendo Wii and how it made console gaming accessible to traditionally non-gamers.

Link to video

They have some tips for looking for disruptive innovations:

1. Look for markets where some constraint that inhibit consumption, such as:

• Don’t have skills
• Don’t have money
• Can’t access the solution
• Sometimes it takes too long.

1. Identify where people have important unsatisfied jobs to be done. Where there is a problem that the customer cannot adequately solve. Find that customer and ease their suffering.
2. Don’t focus on making an existing product better, but doing it simpler or cheaper, more accessible more affordable.
3. The customer can rarely articulate the things that they need. You have to trust your intuition and judgment to put things in the market place and see how things play out. You cannot rely on data because data deals with the past. You need to trust yourself and create your own data.
4. Focus is not on customers that are demanding but customers who are undemanding or not consuming anything at all.