In business theory, disruptive innovation is innovation that creates a new market and value network or enters at the bottom of an existing market and eventually displaces established market-leading firms, products, and alliances. The term, "disruptive innovation" was popularized by the American academic Clayton Christensen and his collaborators beginning in 1995, but the concept had been previously described in Richard N. Foster's book Innovation: The Attacker's Advantage and in the paper "Strategic responses to technological threats", as well as by Joseph Schumpeter in the book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy.
Innovation is the practical implementation of ideas that result in the introduction of new goods or services or improvement in offering goods or services. ISO TC 279 in the standard ISO 56000:2020 defines innovation as "a new or changed entity, realizing or redistributing value". Others have different definitions; a common element in the definitions is a focus on newness, improvement, and spread of ideas or technologies.
New product development (NPD) or product development in business and engineering covers the complete process of launching a new product to the market. Product development also includes the renewal of an existing product and introducing a product into a new market. A central aspect of NPD is product design. New product development is the realization of a market opportunity by making a product available for purchase. The products developed by an commercial organisation provide the means to generate income.
In theories of competition in economics, a barrier to entry, or an economic barrier to entry, is a fixed cost that must be incurred by a new entrant, regardless of production or sales activities, into a market that incumbents do not have or have not had to incur. Because barriers to entry protect incumbent firms and restrict competition in a market, they can contribute to distortionary prices and are therefore most important when discussing antitrust policy. Barriers to entry often cause or aid the existence of monopolies and oligopolies, or give companies market power. Barriers of entry also have an importance in industries. First of all it is important to identify that some exist naturally, such as brand loyalty. Governments can also create barriers to entry to meet consumer protection laws, protecting the public. In other cases it can also be due to inherent scarcity of public resources needed to enter a market.
Clayton Magleby Christensen was an American academic and business consultant who developed the theory of "disruptive innovation", which has been called the most influential business idea of the early 21st century. Christensen introduced "disruption" in his 1997 book The Innovator's Dilemma, and it led The Economist to term him "the most influential management thinker of his time." He served as the Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School (HBS), and was also a leader and writer in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He was one of the founders of the Jobs to Be Done development methodology.
A cash cow is product or service that generates significant revenue over a long period of time for the company that sells it. They also generate more cash than they consume. Revenue “milked” from cash cows is often used to subsidise less profitable parts of a business.
There is no agreed upon definition of value network. A general definition that subsumes the other definitions is that a value network is a network of roles linked by interactions in which economic entities engage in both tangible and intangible exchanges to achieve economic or social good. This definition is similar to one given by Verna Allee.
The customer base is a group of customers who repeatedly purchase the goods or services of a business. These customers are a main source of revenue for a company. The customer base may be considered a business's target market, where customer behaviors are well understood through market research or past experience. Relying on a customer base can make growth and innovation difficult.
The technology adoption lifecycle is a sociological model that describes the adoption or acceptance of a new product or innovation, according to the demographic and psychological characteristics of defined adopter groups. The process of adoption over time is typically illustrated as a classical normal distribution or "bell curve". The model calls the first group of people to use a new product "innovators", followed by "early adopters". Next come the "early majority" and "late majority", and the last group to eventually adopt a product are called "laggards" or "phobics". For example, a phobic may only use a cloud service when it is the only remaining method of performing a required task, but the phobic may not have an in-depth technical knowledge of how to use the service.
Michael E. Raynor is a Canadian writer and an expert on business management practices.
Innovation management is a combination of the management of innovation processes, and change management. It refers to product, business process, marketing and organizational innovation. Innovation management is the subject of ISO 56000 series standards being developed by ISO TC 279.
Lean startup is a methodology for developing businesses and products that aims to shorten product development cycles and rapidly discover if a proposed business model is viable; this is achieved by adopting a combination of business-hypothesis-driven experimentation, iterative product releases, and validated learning. Lean startup emphasizes customer feedback over intuition and flexibility over planning. This methodology enables recovery from failures more often than traditional ways of product development.
The innovation butterfly is a metaphor that describes how seemingly minor perturbations to project plans in a system connecting markets, demand, product features, and a firm's capabilities can steer the project, or an entire portfolio of projects, down an irreversible path in terms of technology and market evolution.
Mark W. Johnson is co-founder and senior partner at Innosight, a growth strategy consulting firm, which he co-founded with Clayton Christensen in 2000.
Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI) is a strategy and innovation process developed by Anthony W. Ulwick. It is built around the theory that people buy products and services to get jobs done. As people complete these jobs, they have certain measurable outcomes that they are attempting to achieve. It links a company's value creation activities to customer-defined metrics.
Innosight is a strategy consultancy within Huron Consulting Group, advising global enterprises on business strategy, innovation, and growth transformation. Innosight was founded in 2000 by Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen and senior partner Mark W. Johnson. Innosight uses methods based on the concept of disruptive innovation, a theory defined by Christensen in his book The Innovator's Dilemma. The company headquarters is located in Boston, MA, with additional offices in Switzerland, Chicago, and New York. Andrew Waldeck is the practice's global managing partner.
Creative disruption was introduced in 1992 by TBWA's chairman Jean-Marie Dru. It refers to a radical change in a marketplace brought about by the overturning of existing conventions.
Anthony (Tony) W. Ulwick is the founder and chief executive officer of Strategyn, LLC. an innovation consulting firm based in San Francisco. He is the creator of Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI).
Management System (Open Source) is a socio-technical system that leverages the cumulative knowledge of management practitioners and evidenced based research from the past 130 years. The system was developed by DoD components in partnership with industry experts and academic researchers and builds off of the US Department of Wars version 1.0 open source management system - Training Within Industry.
Efosa Ojomo is a Nigerian author, researcher and speaker. He leads the Global Prosperity research group at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, a think tank based in Boston and Silicon Valley and is a senior research fellow at the Harvard Business School. Efosa speaks regularly on innovation and has presented his work at TED, the Aspen Ideas Festival, the World Bank, Harvard, Yale, Oxford and at several other conferences and institutions. In January 2019, Efosa and Harvard Business School professor, Clayton Christensen published "The Prosperity Paradox: How Innovation Can Lift Nations Out of Poverty".
