Understanding Disruptive Innovation

EDITOR'S NOTE: Special thanks to Tia Smith for writing today's blog post. You can connect with her on LinkedIn. 

The widespread adoption of the term “disruption” to describe any force that shakes up an industry has created a particular kind of faux pas in the business world, where business leaders often default to using it for a much wider spread of changes than the technical definition actually implies.

Let’s take a closer look at why disruption is misused to describe a cascade of events, rather than its intended use: to describe the technical strategy behind a company’s actions.

In this video, Harvard Business School Professor, Clayton Christensen discusses how small businesses are able to bypass larger successful industry giants by giving customers the bottom line - a simple product at a reasonable price that gets the job done. Larger companies sustain their innovation by adding new features and upgrades to their current products to satisfy the higher paying customers and often forget about the economy users that just want the bottom line.

According to Christensen, the only way for larger industry giants to maintain innovation is to break off into a new unit, with a separate business strategy and independent growth projections, allowing the isolated unit of the larger entity to be disruptive on its own. My favorite example is Nest, a company acquired by Google, who is innovating by its own standards.

It’s important to distinguish the difference between the term “disruption” as it was meant to be used, and “disruption” as it’s being thrown around today. Disruption, as it is meant to be used, is a technical, analytical business strategy that empowers a business to open up a new market which may change consumer behavior. Today, however, disruption is a term often uttered to classify any new business idea as successful and powerful. You can learn more about how strategists think about disruption in this HBR article.

Pulsara is always focused on the bottom line. We’re not interested in adding bells and whistles to our product. Our goal is to empower healthcare professionals with the lowest-level functionality that they need in order to do their jobs - transfer patients, decrease treatment times, and get more STEMI and stroke patients to treatment sooner.