MIT Sloan Management Review, July 28, 2016
by Theodore Kinni
Thanks to Clayton Christensen, we throw the word “disruption” around pretty freely these days. But Strategy& consultant Alexander Kandybin reminds us that many of the competitive challenges that we call disruptions don’t actually fit Christensen’s definition of the term: “An innovation that is disruptive allows a whole new population of consumers at the bottom of a market access to a product or service that was historically only accessible to consumers with a lot of money or a lot of skill.”In an article in strategy+business, Kandybin warns executives that misidentifying major competitive challenges — like new products, technologies, and business models — as disruptions can lead to flawed strategic responses. Instead, he counsels them to learn to recognize different kinds of market dislocations (“radical breakaways from the existing market that occur when a company introduces a business model or a product that sits apart from those of competitors”), the directions from which they can come, and the best responses for each.
Kandybin’s approach offers more nuanced strategic responses to digital competitive threats. “Two of them, matching the threat and absorbing the threat, can be effective when incumbents are facing new entrants coming from any direction (from the top, side, or bottom),” writes the consultant. “A third, leapfrogging the threat, is most effective in dealing with dislocation from the top and from the side. And finally, the strategy of ignoring the innovation is most commonly associated with disruption from the bottom.
“Each strategy has risks, especially when it is used at the wrong moment or against the wrong threat,” Kandybin adds. “But when you understand where the threat is coming from and how it is changing your market, you can choose a strategic response that is likely to sustain your business.” Read the rest here
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