One Hundred Days To Disruption

By Scott D. Anthony, Brad Gambill

The concepts of disruptive innovation are powerful tools with which to spot high-potential opportunities. Whenever we run an idea-generation session, we are struck by how intuitive and powerful people find the core disruptive concepts. They allow managers in even the most moribund of industries to quickly envision entirely new, fertile fields of growth.

However, we've noticed a disturbing pattern. If we check back with a company 60 days after a one-time ideation workshop, we frequently find that nothing has happened. Why? Managers returned to their desks, stepped back into the daily grind, and the optimistic feelings generated in the session slowly disappeared or were consumed by near-term priorities.

The gap between the germ of a disruptive idea and successful commercialization can be wide. Sometimes, managers can feel like they have not developed detailed enough plans to move forward. After a successful ideation session they might say, "How do we know we generated the right idea?" or "There's no way we could, in a day, really develop a robust enough plan to actually spend money on."

In Pictures: Five Steps To Disruption

And sometimes, managers will go to the other extreme. They will develop an extremely detailed business plan that requires massive investment of dollars and human resources. These plans typically never see the light of day, because senior managers intuitively (and correctly) get squeamish about placing big bets on highly risky plans. There is another way. Through work with some of our clients—many of them in Asia—we have developed a simple, five-step process that can help companies go from a desire to disrupt to a funded disruptive business plan in less than 100 days.

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