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All companies aspire to reach that critical billion dollar mark " a steep goal for any business. Google, eBay, Yahoo, and Intuit are just a few examples of an elite group of companies that built breakthrough ideas into billion dollar businesses. In the recently released book Blueprint to a Billion: 7 Essentials to Achieve Exponential Growth, David G. Thomson identified the success-patterns of these billion-dollar Blueprint companies.

Innosight found that over 50% of the blueprint companies [that reached a billion] studied by Thomson were disruptive businesses, supporting Thomsons first Essential to building a billion dollar business: develop a breakthrough value proposition that creates, redefines or optimizes a market.

If you have been following Innosight and this blog, you know that disruptive businesses that either create new markets or reshape existing markets by delivering relatively simple, convenient, low-cost innovations have a higher probability of success than those that do not. Properly managed, disruptive strategies have tremendous potential to create growth and transform markets.

The key to creating your own billion dollar baby is to find the next big idea for growth and then properly manage that growth on a trajectory to a billion dollars. Easy, right? If you would like to learn more about how to grow your business to a billion, check out these resources:

To learn more:

Blueprint to a Billion: From Disruption to Dominance by JOE SINFIELD, DAVID G. THOMSON, AND CHRIS CARTER " forthcoming article in Strategy & Innovation

FREE WEBINAR: Join David Thomson and Joe Sinfield for The Path to a Billion, August 24th 11:00am EDT

1-day Workshop: The Path to a Billion: Turning a Big Idea into a Billion Dollar Business, September 21st, Reston, VA

Wal-Mart?s recently announced foray into social networking, ?The Hub,? or ?School Your Way,? seems so incredibly clumsy, forced, and blunt that its success is nearly unimaginable. The site exists in order to sell the uber-retailer?s cool clothes to cool kids. Wal-Mart-loving fashion conscious teens can create profiles that express some personal information, show off hot pics flashing smart ?Mart threads, and even submit video clips that may be made into actual Wal-Mart commercials. The idea is to build brand loyalty and defray the baseless conception that Wal-Mart?s clothes are bland and dasshile promoting select advertisers? products and, perhaps, mining some cool data from kids? profiles. Sounds too good to be true, right? Get this, there?s a catch: all content posted by users to the site will be scrubbed by censors to insure that it meets Wal-Mart?s standards of decency. This seems like a classic example of a large, powerful, and well-funded company attempting to cram into a disruptive space. Often, such efforts are frustrated by the need for different resources, processes, or values in an emerging market. Wal-Mart famously promotes conservative lifestyles, censors media sold in its stores, and forbids alcohol at corporate events -- governing values that seem antithetical to the freewheeling ?hey dude check out these clips of me drinking? world of teenage social networking. Can Wal-Mart?s values (and blatant attempts at self-promotion) fly on the Internet? In order to understand what social networking is all about ? and, consequently, how success can be achieved ? it is essential to understand users? ?Jobs to be Done.? Common wisdom is that teens flock to MySpace and its ilk to express, establish, and play with their identities in a relatively undefined space free of adult influence or meddling. The success of Wal-Mart?s venture rests on this question: how essential is that ?free of adult influence or meddling? bit to the ultimate social networking Job? To many American parents, familiar, ubiquitous and socially conservative Wal-Mart is a whole lot more wholesome and acceptable than MySpace, so, to their kids, The Hub may be to social networking what Christian Rock is to MTV ? an attainable, safe, and ?good enough? alternative. Can ease of access outweigh restrictions on expression on the Internet? In China, certainly, the young are willing to put up with censorship in exchange for access; perhaps getting online is ?good enough,? and freedom of expression is overshot. Assuming Wal-Mart can work out the heavy-handed kinks in its initial design and limit the intrusiveness of its attempts to monetize the site (big assumptions), The Hub figures to be a good barometer for the red state/blue state dynamic among the young and the development of Internet culture in America. Get a load of the fashions at schoolyourway.walmart.com

Each issue of S&I, we feature a person who is in the trenches of disruption. Recently, we heard from Horace Dediu and Chris Briglin, who work in Nokias Enterprise Solutions developing new market entry strategies and business models. Nokia Enterprise Solutions develops devices and server products that improve mobile worker productivity. An excerpt of their writing follows, but the full article can be read by subscribing here.

Disruptive innovation theory can be a powerful management tool to help define a companys path to future growth. To extract real value from the theory, however, weve needed to work diligently to fully understand the power and limitations of disruption.
Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen refers to this in-depth training as getting a disruptive black belt. At Nokia, we have found that the learning process is perhaps just as onerous and time-consuming as getting a real black belt in martial arts.
The correct use of the theories is a matter not only of practice, but of continuous trial and, unfortunately, error. This persistent practice pays real dividends that can improve company performance"and lead to real career distinction.

Our journey at Nokia Enterprise Solutions business group has revealed four primary insights:
1. Begin by rigorously studying your past patterns of innovation
2. The only constant in disruptive innovation is change
3. New resources, processes, and values need buy-in from the top
4. Answering questions is easy, asking the right ones is hard

Every so often, I am struck by a truly painfully sustaining product. This time, I feel compelled to share this "innovation" with the avid readers of our blog.

The company, Water Bank of America, attests that its suite of products, IceBlocks, ScotchRocks, and IceKids, fulfills the needs of the underserved high end consumer of Ice. It is hard to point to a more benign and commoditized product than frozen water - but this ambitious firm has purified and packaged the h2o into individually-frozen cubes for use by the discerning drinker:

Our survey of this target market has demonstrated that consumers are seeking the same level of purity for the ice cubes they place in their favourite alcoholic beverages.

While there may be a job-to-be-done for travelers to countries with unsafe drinking water and a strong need for ice cold beverages, that does not appear to be the target market. Still, perhaps we underestimate the population underserved by the tainted bricks of water waiting in our country's freezers.

One can only imagine that the margin on this product is sky-high, particularly as they note distribution costs are low. Blocks are shipped in their liquid form, and thus needn't be refrigerated in transit.

However, for the bargain shopping affluent among us, stay tuned for the family pack of 200 cubes, coming to a supermarket near you!

From the Wall Street Journal this morning comes a story about disruption in interstate bus travel. New entrant Megabus.com, hubbed in Chicago, serves eight cities in the Midwest and advertises fares as low as $1.50. Like its airline counterpart Southwest, the companys operating expenses are far below rivals. Passengers reserve tickets online eliminating staffing costs. Megabus routes leave from street corners avoiding the congestion and fees of major bus terminals. The service targets both non-consumers, drivers wary of Chicagos $3+ gas, and low end consumers of other bus services willing to forego flexibility and amenities for bargain basement prices. On a typical route, rival Greyhound advertises fares three times higher than megabus.

Low end bus services have had success in other markets. The famed Fung-Wah bus services linked cities like Boston and New York for as little as $10. Fung-Wah initially served the cities Asian communities traveling Chinatown to Chinatown. Despite few amenities, a spotty safety and on-time record and the occasional live chicken passenger Fung-Wah and its imitators soon became favorites with students and budget travelers up and down the east coast. And Megabuss own parent company Stagecoach started a similar bargain bus network in Scotland.

So how does high(er) end rival Greyhound respond? By emphasizing its upmarket amenities. According to the WSJ: Greyhound says its customers can walk in and buy a ticket on the day they travel, rather than having to reserve it online. Then, they can wait in terminals with wireless Internet and TV sets.

How about it? Is megabus good enough or do you need Wi-Fi to make the wait for your bus ride worthwhile?

Recently, Apple has received acclaim for the fabulous success of its iPod product line. About 15 years ago, Apple was on the verge of pioneering another category with its Newton personal digital assistant (PDA). That effort famously flopped. It wasnt just Apple that got it wrong, however. Sony, Motorola, and Hewlett-Packard, among others, failed to pioneer the category. All told, companies squandered more than $1 billion following doomed strategies. Who won the space? A startup called Palm Computing.

The high failure rate of smart companies in a new space shouldnt be a surprise: An overwhelming amount of evidence suggests that companies entering into new markets tend to start with the wrong strategy. This simple statement has profound implications. No one would pour money into a strategy known to be fatally flawed, but companies make just such a mistake by stepping up investment in an unproven strategy too early.

We believe that an emergent strategy process can improve a companys odds of success by systematically addressing the risks and unknowns that typify uncertain ideas. In a recent Strategy & Innovation article, the full text of which is available by subscribing here, we give a detailed explanation of what an emergent strategy process is and also describe four simple steps managers can follow to master the process. By comprehensively laying out assumptions and risks, focusing first on the critical areas of uncertainty, executing smart experiments, and adjusting based on the results, companies can quickly adjust"or shelve"flawed ideas, increasing the chances of ultimate success.

The article concludes with a look at how this process can help companies speed through the fuzzy front-end of innovation. Many process experts advise firms to cut the number of projects they undertake to speed the innovation process. Counterintuitively, companies that follow the approach we outline described can speed the overall process by increasing the number of projects they consider.