Big Bang Disruption: Strategy in the Age of Devastating Innovation

by Larry Downes

Once the disruptors arrive, there’s little chance for a competitive response.

disruptive technologies start life less valuable and feature rich than those the current market supports, but at a significantly better price—at least for customers who will accept lower quality.

Few enterprises have mastered the art of serial disruption,

From Kansas City to Moscow, from London to Nairobi, and from Santiago to Davao in the Philippines, a new generation of entrepreneurs is quickly learning the ways of hackathons, crowdfunding, and combinatorial innovation we describe in the pages that follow.

“Obviously we like the price of free, because consumers like that as well,”

Mobile navigation apps are an example of what we call a Big Bang Disruptor, an innovation that, from the moment of its creation, is both better and cheaper than the products and services against which it competes.

Thanks to dramatic changes in the core economics of innovation in general, every industry is now at risk from competitors that enter the market simultaneously better and cheaper.

Indeed, nearly everything you know about strategy and innovation has suddenly become wrong.

That’s because one way or the other, today every business is a digital business.

When inflation is low, as it has been for some time in a number of countries, buyers see actual price declines from technology improvements.

Customers are so accustomed to this effect that they now expect the goods and services they buy to get better and cheaper with each passing year.

When Big Bang Disruptors arrive, the slope of market adoption is nearly vertical.

A Big Bang Disruptor is simply an experiment that goes very well.

Instead, the innovators collectively get it wrong, wrong, wrong—and then unbelievably right.