Disruptive Innovation: Join the Pirates Not the Navy

There are various literary and cinematic adaptations of business lessons that the late Steve Jobs taught us. At Ishan Institute of Management & Technology, the best MBA College in Delhi NCR, the academic team has handpicked three such pieces. First, there is this all time great business film: The Pirates of Silicon Valley that focused on the early days of Steve Jobs and the challenges of growing Apple from being a junkyard start up to a blue chip corporation. Second, there is the book written by Walter Isaacson which many of our generation have felt as one of the very best on the late iconic Steve Jobs. The third piece is yet again a movie. Steve Jobs as the movie is titled got Michael Fassbender a nomination at the Oscars in the best actor category and while his acting may not have created ripples, the movie drives home important business lessons on disruptive innovation in a very stylized way.

                                 

Disruptive innovation, a brainchild of business academicians of Harvard business school has been doing the rounds in academics and business. Since the year 1995, the term disruptive innovation has been used very liberally by management theorists and business leaders leading to the distortion of the concept. Steve Jobs the original disruptor and these pieces of literature and cinema that are referred above teach us some very important business lessons on disruptive innovation.

First, disruptive innovation is about breaking the rules of the game. It is about what software developers and digital marketers working on search engines and social media refer to as “gaming the system.” As such disruptive innovations as a thumb rule originate in low-end and new market footholds. Low end footholds of the market are those segments of customers who have been taken for granted by the existing market leaders and thus there is an elbow space to cater to the requirements of this segment of the market by focusing on design thinking. Design thinking enables disruptors to design products and processes around these customers who have been neglected and are good enough to make inroads into these markets. Yet again there are precedents where disruptors participate in market development and build markets from the scratch.

Secondly, disruptors do not chase mainstream customers unless product quality improves to their standards. The iconic Steve Jobs worked with singular focus on improving the graphic user interface and the drop down menu. Getting Lisa to say “Hello” was yet another attempt to send a crystal clear message to the audience that unlike the “Big Brother”, Apple was willing to make its products interactive. They did not believe in selling boxes. They wanted to sell machines that would appreciate and understand the challenges of users.

Thirdly, many people and pundits on disruptive innovation get it wrong by asserting that disruptive innovation is a one point stop that leads to something that is water shed in the history of that industry vertical. This is in contrast to what reality offers. Steve Jobs showed the world that disruptive innovation had to be a continuous essay in persuasion rather than a one point development of a new product or process. It has to be a long lasting campaign that has shock value for the bigger and more established market leaders and unsettle them and the dynamics of the market. The value of disruptive innovation lies in challenging the equilibrium of market dynamics and the status quo enjoyed by market leaders.

Steve Jobs used to very often remark: Join the pirates, not the navy.” This statement is worth a million dollars in our attempts to understand disruptive innovation. Companies like IBM that have always focused on an all out frontal attack on the markets have been able to do so using the great repetitive model. This model enables them to scale up rapidly and expand business models that are already tried and tested. Apple under Steve Jobs had been the disruptor. It was built around the strategies of guerrilla marketing that involved hide, hit and run. The navy offers discipline, protocol, anticipated moves and non accelerating speeds of growth. Pirates offer shock value, innovation and speed in their business models.