Article: Downes &Nunes (2013) Big Bang Disruption

7 important questions on Article: Downes &Nunes (2013) Big Bang Disruption

But the strategic model of disruptive innovation we've all become comfortable with has a blind spot

It assumes that disrupters start with a lower-priced, inferior alternative that chips away at the least profitable segments, giving an incumbent business time to start a skunkworks and develop its own nextgeneration products.

Key 1 to survival: l is understanding that bigbang disruptions differ from more-traditional innovations not just in degree but in kind.

Besides being cheaper than established offerings, they're also more inventive and better integrated with other products and services. And today many of them exploit consumers' growing access to product information and ability to contribute to and share it.

Key 2 to survival: develop new tools

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.
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Surviving Big-Bang Disruption

Big-bang disrupters are rewriting the rules of industry after industry—and the new rules hold only until the next wave of disruption comes along. There's almost no time to adapt. Bold strategies are the only way to cope

Get closer to the exits, and be ready for a fast escape.

It's up to senior management to confront the reality that even long-successful strategies may be suddenly upended, requiring a radical recreation of the business.


Joseph Schumpeter: “Creative destruction”, where capitalism destroys old industries and
economic systems in the process of innovating new ones.

- Industry disruption as an inherent pattern in capitalism.


Two sides of a Business model
To allow for better understanding of disruption, we split the business model into two sides.


Side 1: Value proposition = the value that a business offers to the customer.
Side 2: value network = the people, partners, assets, and processes that enable the business to create, deliver, and earn value from the value proposition.
• Includes things like channels, pricing, cost structure, assets, resources, and the customer segments on which a business is focused.

Once we can see any business model in terms of these two sides, we are ready to apply them in a new theory of how disruption happens

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