How is Disruptive Innovation different from Break-through Innovation ? The 4 types ..

Innovation is the watchword for all management gurus the world over.  Gary Hamel in his famous HBR article of 2006, The Why, What and How of Management Innovation, spoke of the different aspects of innovation that was very path breaking. (click here)

Gary Hamel say that Management Innovation creates long lasting advantage when it meets the following three conditions

• 
  the innovation is based on a management principle that challenges management orthodoxy
• it is systematic encompassing a range of processes and methods and
• it is part of an ongoing program of Innovation where progress is compounded over time
  

Greg Satel in 2017 by his paper in June 2017 HBR (click here) tries to illustrate the major types of innovation based on two dimensions, how much one knows of a problem and of the skills domain

Disruptive innovation at first disrupts in a small way, often offering a very low quality alternative. But over time it improves and finally overtakes the original product in quality and captures the whole market.

Examples are many (click here..)

Steel mini mills, smartphone cameras, video streaming services etc are examples of disruptive innovation.

Disruption describes a process whereby a smaller company with fewer resources is able to successfully challenge established incumbent businesses - Christensen, Raynor, McDonald, HBR Dec., 2015 (click here).

Disruptive Innovation we find thus happens when the problem is not well defined but we have enough awareness of the domain. It is placed at the bottom right in Greg Satel's Innovation matrix. It starts in undeveloped markets initially and matures to disrupt the market leaders and finally dislodges them. 

Nobody thought the video streaming services would disrupt the CD industry as such, but slowly by delivering sustained better service over years, the video streaming industry dislodged the CD industry. Similar push we see in the area of smartphones, now phablets (phone+tablet), they have already displaced the desktops, slowly are into displacing the laptops too. 

Referring to Greg Satel's Innovation matrix, we find Basic Research happens when we have low knowledge both of the problem and the skills in the domain needed to solve it.  Basic Research is thus left to academic research labs and for research grants to look into. There may be promising results but more often than not, the final picture is not all that rosy and promising.

Breakthrough Innovation happens when the problem is well defined but the domain has not, thus the problem is hard to solve. It helps expose the problem to diverse skills domains.

Sustaining Innovation on the other hand happens when the ecosystem is very open and clear, the problem is well defined and the domain is also well defined. Traditional labs fall in this domain.  Design Thinking exercises can be extremely successful if both the problem and the domain are well defined. (Click here for some excellent Design Thinking exercises we have done in the class in Alliance University in Bangalore, India with students)

The awareness of the different types of innovation happening around helps us to have a deeper understanding of the Innovation landscape and what contributes to each type under what conditions. 

Disruptive Innovation is more like a snake in the grass strategy. The snakes waits in the grass unnoticed till it gets the right opportunity to hit at it's prey. Disruptive Innovation idea is like a snake in the grass. It waits for the opportune moment and strikes at the leader dislodging him from the position and in fact, toppling an entire industry even. 

An awareness of these types of Innovation thus helps us to observe an organisation to understand at what stage it's Innovation process is and what needs to be done to get it on track, to help put it on track to problem and domain definition maturity, sustaining long term innovation. This feeds the next set of innovations.