Digital Disruption Quotes

“Value comes from seeing what customers need and delivering it. Digital disruptors will do all of this at lower cost, with faster development times, and with greater impact on the customer experience than anything that came before.”
― James McQuivey, Digital Disruption: Unleashing the Next Wave of Innovation

“R&D teams have a tendency to confuse product features with customer benefits. They assume that more features equals more benefits. This is not true.”
― James McQuivey, Digital Disruption: Unleashing the Next Wave of Innovation

“They started by cutting out the bottom of a bottle and attaching an old webcam Harry literally had lying around in his office to the bottom of the bottle. They secured the camera inside a plastic bag to make it waterproof, then affixed the whole assembly to the body of the bottle and put water in it. Then they recorded Harry taking a drink, viewed from the unique vantage point of being inside the bottle.”
― James McQuivey, Digital Disruption: Unleashing the Next Wave of Innovation

“Today, only companies that partner promiscuously can accelerate the delivery of their innovative ideas.”
― James McQuivey, Digital Disruption: Unleashing the Next Wave of Innovation

“The only source of competitive advantage now is a focus on knowledge of and engagement with customers.”
― James McQuivey, Digital Disruption: Unleashing the Next Wave of Innovation

“But what if it didn’t take money to make money? What’s terrifying about the digitally disrupted future is that this rhetorical question is already being concretely answered. The mindset of the digital disruptor accelerates every possible process by exploiting digital toolsets that are free for tinkering. Economists talk about trends that reduce barriers to entry. The force of digital disruption doesn’t just reduce these barriers, it obliterates them. This allows the disruptor to take new ideas of any size and potential impact and rapidly pursue target customers at almost no cost and in the space of a few days, rather than years. That’s the power of digital disruption, and it will happen to every industry on the planet, whether that company makes digital products or not. That’s why the rise of millions of digital disruptors like Thomas Suarez, whether they go it alone or choose to disrupt on behalf of massively physical firms like Verizon and Unilever, matters so much. These disruptors will do what they do in whatever industry they find themselves planted, ultimately generating significantly more innovation power into the marketplace.”
― James McQuivey, Digital Disruption: Unleashing the Next Wave of Innovation

“Your competitors probably won’t come from within your industry—they could come from any industry, or from one that doesn’t exist yet.”
― James McQuivey, Digital Disruption: Unleashing the Next Wave of Innovation

“I think that if you can make a decision in a day that would take a week or a month, the whole process is improved.”
― James McQuivey, Digital Disruption: Unleashing the Next Wave of Innovation

“Digital disruption is a mindset that ultimately leads to a way of behaving; a mindset that bypasses traditional analog barriers, eliminating the gaps and boundaries that prevent people and companies from giving customers what they want in the moment that they want it.”
― James McQuivey, Digital Disruption: Unleashing the Next Wave of Innovation

“Digital disruption accelerates competing ideas even as it facilitates the entry of a previously impossible number and magnitude of ideas.”
― James McQuivey, Digital Disruption: Unleashing the Next Wave of Innovation

“If people + infrastructure = disruption, then digital innovators + digital infrastructure = digital disruption.”
― James McQuivey, Digital Disruption: Unleashing the Next Wave of Innovation

“Those who refuse to join will find their own knowledge shrivels up and dies because it isn’t strengthened by interaction with and multiplication by the knowledge of others.”
― James McQuivey, Digital Disruption: Unleashing the Next Wave of Innovation

“A lot of kids these days like to play games. But now they want to make them. And it’s difficult, because not many kids know where to go to find out how to make a program. I mean, for soccer, you could go to a soccer team, for violin, you could get lessons for a violin. But what if you want to make an app? Where do you go to find out how to make an app?”
― James McQuivey, Digital Disruption: Unleashing the Next Wave of Innovation

“innovating the adjacent possible. This means rapidly identifying a list of the next things your customers want and quickly giving them the few that are easiest for you to deliver. In this model, we do not predict the future of our product. We start with the next possible thing our customer needs and let the future find us.”
― James McQuivey, Digital Disruption: Unleashing the Next Wave of Innovation

“informal study identified three distinct patterns of drinking from containers:”
― James McQuivey, Digital Disruption: Unleashing the Next Wave of Innovation

“Harry’s team analyzed all the research that had ever been done about how people drink. What they found was astonishing. There was no research.”
― James McQuivey, Digital Disruption: Unleashing the Next Wave of Innovation

“one of FerroKin’s most important solutions to the cost problem is to have no physical office, instead relying on wireless phones and home internet connections to coordinate an intensive round of pre-clinical investigations and regulatory filings. “We wanted to do this from our homes,” he says, because putting a premium on being in the same physical location every day and attending endless meetings unnecessarily constrains whom you can hire and what work skills you pay for in an employee. Sensitive medical information can be secured digitally even as it is shared among distributed team members and the outsourced labs and clinics that are performing the work. As a result, digital reduces the barriers to focusing on the job at hand.”
― James McQuivey, Digital Disruption: Unleashing the Next Wave of Innovation

“inventions alone don’t create huge value. Not unless they disrupt something.”
― James McQuivey, Digital Disruption: Unleashing the Next Wave of Innovation

“the mindset may be digital and the tools will definitely be digital, but that mindset and those tools can be used to disrupt any industry faster than old disruption could.”
― James McQuivey, Digital Disruption: Unleashing the Next Wave of Innovation