Good Idea! Now find a better one.

We’ve been cruising through the archives of Michael Urlocker’s On Disruption blog. It’s a great read, especially if you like great ideas. And that’s what disruption is really about, a specific type of great idea that challenges the prevailing beliefs, assumptions and rules of an industry.

Urlocker has a pdf on his blog, A CEO’s Guide to Creating New Growth, that details a definition for Disruption, here’s a smattering of what makes for a disruptive idea or innovation:

• Creates a new market or a new context for consumption
• Initially targets underserved or marginal customers
• Is perceived as inferior by existing customers in the mainstream
• is highly valued by early adopters because of some new or different attributes

Another way of describing Disruptive innovation would be an untouchable reorientation. A Reorientation because it takes the conventional view of what’s valuable and and what’s worthless and flips it. Untouchable because it charges down a path that no entrenched player will follow - at least not at first.

What’s really nice about this type of innovation is its likeness to Sun Tzu’s philosophy: To win without fighting is best. It’s like entering a race where millions go to the first place winner, but no one else show’s up to run.

Real Innovation

Most of what gets labeled with the buzzword, innovation, is marginal at best. For instance, who can argue with a straight face that adding yet another blade to a razor is a brilliant innovation? If you can, raise your hand and keep it up [unsheathes his blade], so I can find you.

That new razor reorients nothing because it takes the conventional view of what makes a razor more valuable: more blades. And Untouchable? Forget it. In the game they’re playing, it’s ridiculously easy to trump them with one more blade.

Ignoring the other features that make up a razor, a disruptive idea would be one that goes back to one blade, like a straight razor, to create a quicker more comfortable shave. This flips what is valuable and what is not, and goes down a path that no one will follow until it’s proven in the marketplace. That gives the innovators time to get it right and cement themselves in the first position.

Ripe for the plucking

The best places to look for potential reorientations or disruptive innovations are in old, established industries. Especially ones with unions and heavy government regulation. That’s why we’re going to look at the Airline business.

We’re going to take 4 areas of the industry that define what’s valuable and what’s not, what’s important and what’s irrelevant. Of the four, two have been implemented and have had a disruptive effect, and two to our knowledge, haven’t been tried. Here are the 4 areas : Flying Multiple Aircraft Types, Assigned Seating, Baggage Handling, and Direct Flights.

But that part will come tommorow. Stay tuned.

Tags: disruption, reorientation, ideas, innovation, michael urlocker