Big Bang Disruption: Strategy in the Age of Devastating Innovation

by Larry Downes

Exponential technologies are the platforms from which innovators launch their Big Bang Disruptors.

“How did you go bankrupt?” asks one character in Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises. “Two ways,” his friend replies. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

Twitter suffered—and survived—what we call “catastrophic success,” one of the most visible characteristics of the second stage of the shark fin—the Big Bang.

Big Bang Disruption devastates existing markets in two ways—gradually and then suddenly.

Many of your customers can easily abandon one set of products for the next Big Bang Disruptor. Yet the cost of serving the remaining users do not, as a general rule, scale down proportionally. So even as new disruptors get better and cheaper, older products become worse and more expensive.

So the Developer’s Program is tasked with getting the best and most diverse apps working with the networks and equipment of AT&T and its partners, including Ericsson, Cisco, Intel, and Microsoft. Together, these companies have invested over $100 million in developer outreach efforts.