“Change is inevitable, it’s only a matter of TIME”

The ever-changing dynamics of the information and telecommunication industry pushes the organizational response to be quick, effective, and appealing. Management needs to acknowledge that innovation and change are inevitable, and it won’t be wise to predict that equilibrium would exist, and success would be constant throughout the time. A common factor why companies rise, and fall is due to poor leadership, innovation & operational efficiency. Innovation and invention should be differentiated, innovation is when you successfully implement the product/service into a market that yields an economic development. Innovation should replace today’s mechanism with tomorrow’s new thing and innovation is the only function that is fundamental in history.

Various notions to disruptions were developed by different authors over a period, among those the one coined by Clayton Christensen became ubiquitous “products and services which are easily accessible and available to a larger population”. To be successful, the company is predestined to pass through the 3 stages: efficiency innovation, sustaining innovation, and disrupting innovation.

The disruption of industries has accelerated from 60 years to 20 years, and it continues at a faster pace. Christensen presented the theory of disruption and what causes the disruption in the mid-1990s, despite this companies across the globe find it difficult to survive the accelerating rate of disruption.

For a firm whether an incumbent or an entrant, identifying the job and devising solutions to accomplish that job is where the process of disruption takes place. Let’s take an example of courier service company DHL; here the job was to deliver a package from one place to another, over a period, various methods of delivering were identified by people until in 1969 DHL came disrupting the market.

New start-up firms with limited resources, limited-service offerings end up capturing the vacuum which the incumbent firm created. The innovative product/service offered by these new entrants aren’t of superior technical specification but rather inferior; this offering has a ‘niche’ customer segment as the starting point into the market. The lower pricing offered was very lucrative for the ‘niche’ segments which the incumbent firms ignored.

The Question, ‘how to survive disruption’ remains vague even after these many years, below are some measures to evade the impacts of disruption:

1. Diagnose, monitor, and respond.
2. Identify loopholes in your business model.
3. Embrace agility in business process.
4. Ask, what already exists to solve a customer’s need.
5. Deliver better value proposition to the consumer: Price, Access, Quality, Simplicity.

Disruption can never be avoided but with proactive approach it’s effect could be delayed or minimized, it’s only a matter of time when the world will see another downfall as of BlackBerry and Nokia.