Big-Bang Disruption

By Larry Downes and Paul F. Nunes

In recent years a newdisquietingform of disruptive innovation has emerged, one that beats incumbents on both price and quality right from the start and quickly sweeps through every customer segment. This kind of big bang” disruption can devastate entire product lines virtually overnight. Look at the effect that free navigation apps, preloaded on smartphones, had on the market for devices made by TomTom, Garmin, and Magellan.

Big-bang disruptions often come out of the blue from people who aren’t your traditional competitors. Frequently, they’re developed by inventors who are just doing low-cost experiments with existing technologies to see what new products they can dream up. Once launched, these innovations don’t adhere to conventional strategic paths or normal patterns of market adoption. That makes them incredibly hard to combat.

Though technology- and information-intensive firms are most vulnerable to big bangs, mature industries face this threat, too. Credit cards, automobiles, and education, for instance, are all experiencing early warning signs. But in every industry, big-bang disruption will be keeping executives in a cold sweat for a long time to come.

This article, which originally appeared in Harvard Business Review, offers some strategic principles to help businesses survive big bangs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
• Release date: Jan 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9781625275059

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The Big Idea

Big-Bang Disruption

A new kind of innovator can wipe out incumbents in a flash.

by Larry Downes and Paul F. Nunes

March 2013. Reprint R1303B. Copyright © 2013 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.

Idea in Brief

Disruptive technological innovations have traditionally started out cheap and simple, gradually improving in quality until they challenged incumbents.

New digital platforms such as the smartphone, however, are enabling innovations that offer customers both a better experience and a much lower price, right out of the gate. (Think of free mobile apps’ superiority to dedicated GPS devices.)

These big-bang disruptions are often unplanned and unintentional. They do not follow conventional strategic paths or normal patterns of market adoption.

To survive them, incumbents need to develop new tools to detect radical change in the offing, new strategies to slow down disrupters, new ways to leverage existing assets in other markets, and a more diversified approach to investment.

By now any well-read executive knows the basic playbook for saving a business from disruptive innovation. Nearly two decades of management research, beginning with Joseph L. Bower and Clayton M. Christensen’s 1995 HBR article, Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave, have taught businesses to be on the lookout for upstarts that offer cheap substitutes to their products, capture new, low-end customers, and then gradually move upmarket to pick off higher-end customers, too. When these disrupters appear, we’ve learned, it’s