Digital Disruption: Unleashing the Next Wave of Innovation

Written by James McQuivey

Narrated by James McQuivey

The barriers to entry in your market just vanished. Unexpected competitors are swarming in. Are you ready?

You always knew digital was going to change things, but you didn’t realize how close to home it would hit. In every industry, digital competitors are taking advantage of new platforms, tools, and relationships to undercut competitors, get closer to customers, and disrupt the usual ways of doing business. The only way to compete is to evolve.

James McQuivey of Forrester Research has been teaching people how to do this for over a decade. He’s gone into the biggest companies, even in traditional industries like insurance and consumer packaged goods, and changed the way they think about innovation. Now he’s sharing his approach with you.

McQuivey will show you how Dr. Hugh Reinhoff of Ferrokin BioSciences disrupted the pharmaceutical industry, streamlining connections with doctors and regulators to bring molecules to market far faster—and then sold out for $100 million. How Charles Teague and his team of four people created Lose It!, a weight loss application that millions have adopted, achieving rapid success and undermining titans like Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig in the process.

Regardless of your background and industry, you can learn how to be a digital disruptor too. First, adopt the right mindset: Take risks, invest as cheaply as possible, and build on existing platforms to find the fastest path to solving a customer’s problem.

Second, seek the “adjacent possible”—the space just next to yours where new technology creates opportunity. That’s how Benjamin Rubin and Paolo DePetrillo of Zeo created a $100 sleep monitor that does much of what you’d get from a $3,000 sleep lab visit.

Finally, disrupt yourself. Use these tools to make parts of your business obsolete before your competitors do. That’s what Tim FitzRandolph did at Disney, creating a game that shot to the top of the app store charts.

With the tools in this book you can assess your readiness, learn the disruptive mindset, and innovate rapidly, starting right within your own business.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brilliance Audio
• Release date: Feb 26, 2013
• ISBN: 9781469292915

James McQuivey

James McQuivey is a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research and the leading analyst tracking the development of digital disruption. He comments regularly in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and has contributed to the websites of the Harvard Business Review, The Economist, and Forbes. He also appears frequently on news outlets like CNBC and NPR. McQuivey lives in Needham, Massachusetts, with his wife and the four youngest of their six disruptors.

Reviews for Digital Disruption

[plappen_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The increasing digitization of our world has turned the business world upside down. In every industry, some companies are getting closer to their customers and undercutting other competitors. This book gives the details.There are many, many free digital tools available to potential innovators. Next, a digital platform is needed to get it, whatever it is, to the customer as quickly as possible. These are usually very inexpensive. Keep a very close eye on your feedback. For example, if it says that upgrades should move in this direction, instead of that direction, don't wait until next quarter, or even next month, to do the upgrade; start on it today."Our company is innovative." "Our customers are totally loyal to us." "Our company is un-disruptable." Can you really afford to take such a chance? Companies no longer sell products or services; they sell total product experiences. It starts when a person visits your company online for the first time, and goesall the way until they get the product home and open it. There are ways to measure just how much time a person spends at your website or Facebook page. A company goal might be to get people to spend more time there, instead of simply increasing sales. Don't ask "What new thing can we sell?" Instead, you should ask "What is next thing our customer needs? What adjacent need can we fill that our customer does not even know that they have?" It's tempting to fill any new product or service with benefits for the customer, to be all things to all people. Don't do it. Pick just a couple of the biggest benefits, and concentrate on those.This book is full of examples of how even non-digital experiences like selling shoes can be digitally disrupted. It does a very good job of helping any company to be the disrupter, and not the one being disrupted. It is very much worth reading.