Canvasing for Disruptive and Sustaining Innovation

A disruptive innovation is an innovation that helps create a new market that eventually displaces an existing market. Both startups and innovative companies thrive in this space. This type of innovation typically requires starting with a clean slate and completely rethinking the customer-problem-solution hypotheses. This is where the Lean Canvas shines.

In contrast to disruptive innovation, a sustaining innovation does not create new markets but rather evolves existing ones with better value. In these types of innovations, the question is not one of creating a new market but finding ways to deliver more value to an existing market better. The key question here is: “What does better mean?” The Lean Canvas can also be applied for sustaining innovation, albeit differently.

More established companies typically start out by capturing their overall business model using either the Lean Canvas or BMC. They then use one or more Lean Canvases to home in on the specific customer-problem-solution attributes for driving their value proposition forward.

Whether you are pursuing sustaining or disruptive innovation, the biggest appeal for using the Lean Canvas is that it’s one of the fastest ways for sharing a “whole” idea, versus just your solution, with other people. People usually don’t see what you see. The canvas is a start towards bridging that gap.