An absolutely great statistic on the rewards of disruption from an article by Whitney Johnson in Harvard Business Review:
What Christensen found in his analysis of the disk drive industry (which is discussed in The Innovator's Dilemma, and is foundational to our investing), is that firms seeking growth via new markets are 6x more likely to succeed than firms seeking growth by entering established markets, and the revenue opportunity is 20x greater. It's counterintuitive, isn't it? When we start in a place where no one else wants to play, where the scope of the opportunity appears limited, the odds of success actually improve.
So if disruptive innovation is the ultimate answer to success, how do we define disruptive innovation? How do we know what it is that we need to do in order to disrupt?
The definition Wikipedia gives is:
"An innovation that helps create a new market and value network, and eventually goes on to disrupt an existing market and value network (over a few years or decades), displacing an earlier technology there."
Curious to hear — how do you define disruptive innovation? Give us a shout in the comments.