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Scott Anthonys recent front-page article in Strategy & Innovation (When Can You Sustain and Win? available by subscribing here) discusses circumstances when upstart innovations can succeed by offering best-in-class performance at premium prices. These success stories are important to study and understand, but be careful not to apply the label high-end disruption too quickly.

Take Whole Foods Market, the highly successful retailer of organic foods. The companys prices are notoriously high relative to traditional grocers and the quality of its products are seemingly well-beyond the good enough performance one expects from a disruptive business. So, is Whole Foods a high-end disruptor?

The jobs-to-be-done framework offers a suprising answer to this question. What jobs are Whole Foods customers trying to get done? Presumably, most want to buy fresh, organic or naturally-raised foods that they feel good about serving to their family.

Seen in this light, Whole Foods really is not competing with traditional grocers, which in the past offered almost no organic or all-natural products. To accomplish the above job, customers needed to go to either small, specialty natural food stores or perhaps local farmers markets.

Independent natural food stores are hard to find, and they tend to have limited selection and rather low turnover, meaning their prices are often even higher than Whole Foods. Farmers markets also tend to have high prices and they normally are open only a few times per week.

When one considers the jobs that customers are trying to accomplish, Whole Foods in fact seems to be a classic disruptor: Not only is it offering (slightly) lower prices, but the added convenience of prominent locations, regular hours, and wide selection is enabling new and greater consumption in a variety of contexts.

Whenever you think youve spotted a high-end disruptor, spend some time carefully thinking through the jobs customers are trying to get done. Then, determine which companies, if any, in the market are actually helping them accomplish those jobs. This jobs-based approach can offer surprising insights into how successful companies are actually competing.

"By Clayton M. Christensen

In each issue of Strategy & Innovation, we identify some emerging technologies that we think have disruptive potential. Heres a recent sample of some of the things were keeping our eyes on.

Cracking Open Online Video
Posting online video has long required greater technical expertise than posting photographs. Having received its first round of venture funding in January, VideoEgg seeks to address this, becoming the video equivalent of Flickr, a popular photo sharing social network. The company offers a free plug-in that allows users to drag and drop files to the VideoEgg website, pull images to the website through a webcam or camcorder, or send a video directly from a mobile phone. After uploading, one plays the video by clicking on an HTML link. The business model for the service is still being finalized, but the company hopes to enable more use of video on weblogs.

Helping Small Retailers Step It Up Online
StepUp is attempting to provide a skeleton online presence for smaller retailers that dont have their own site. For less than $50 per month, StepUp will use proprietary inventory software to provide companies with mini-store websites with an inventory price list, product photos, and store directions. Products will also be listed on shopping search engines, such as Googles Froogle. Consumers can go online, look for items sold locally, and then drive to the retailer. By November 2005, StepUp had signed up more than 1,200 retail partners to its growing network.

Taking Biopesticides Upmarket
While the word biotech conjures up thoughts of new blockbuster drugs, there is an enormous market for making existing compounds more efficient. Insectigen, a company hoping to reduce the cost and increase the efficiency of the popular but expensive biopesticide Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), has attracted $2 million in funding. Insectigen will try to develop new forms of its existing extender protein to address the $3 billion market for Bt improvement technologies in transgenic crops. Bt products"used to control moths, butterflies, beetles, small flies and mosquitoes"now consume one percent of the worldwide agrochemical market, but this percentage could increase dramatically if the company can improve Bt performance and reduce Bt costs.