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Health & Fitness

How to be Profitably Disruptive

How can you be profitably disruptive?

First though, what is disruption?

In academia there is a theory known as Disruptive Innovation, and the father of this theory is Harvard Business School professor Clay Christensen. What the theory outlines, basically, is how and why start-up firms are often successful in overtaking incumbent firms. At first glance, one would think that large, profitable, experienced firms that are entrenched in their respective industries would have tremendous advantages when encountering start-up firms.

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This, however, has been proven to be an incomplete view of things.

Anybody who pays attention to corporate news has seen this happen over and over again. From the up-ending of VHS by DVD players, the demise of Blackberry at the hands of Apple, and the dethroning of MySpace by Facebook, this happens more often than many people realize. Large, established firms that are able to fend off start-up firms and maintain their position are the exception rather than the rule. Think about it. Some of the largest, most profitable, and/or well known companies in the current economy were either non-existent or just beginning 20 years ago.

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Google, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, Apple, Tesla, Twitter, LinkedIn are just a handful of examples.

Some may argue that these are, in effect (including Tesla), technology firms, but I disagree. Do people think of railroad firms as technological innovators? Or DVD firms as “tech” firms? No, because the technology component of their business models is not why they are successful. Technology can imitated and improved on within months, so that is not enough. What these firms have managed to do is recreate the value they are offering to their customers, to great success. They discovered a gap in what we being delivered to customers, and figured out a comprehensive way to do it better.

The question is, then, what can you do to recreate value? Whether it be at your job, a small business idea you have thought up, or some kind of volunteer/charitable foundation work you are involved in. Take a few minutes to think it over, and you will be surprised at how many opportunities there are for things to be improved.

Let’s get disruptive!

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