Most innovations - be they in product/service, process or business model - represent improvements on 'the way things are currently done'. These sustaining innovations - which can be minor or quite substantial - build on existing technologies, established customer needs and well known ways of doing business. Established firms tend to do well at sustaining innovation because they require established capabilities, existing assets and widely held beliefs about 'how the business works'.

However, as Polaroid and others can testify, new technologies or simply new business models can produce rather different products, services, processes or simply ways in which business is done which offer significant advantages. These innovations tend to require new skills, assets and mind sets. Coupled with the fact that they start small and may appear poorly aligned to perceived customer needs, established firms generally have a hard time either spotting them or engaging with them. It is generally smaller firms - or firms from another industry - which spot and seize the opportunity. We call these disruptive innovations as they tend turn the existing rules of competition upside down and can radically change the competitive order in an industry.

This presents established companies with a tough challenge. They need to continue to do what comes naturally - that is pursue sustaining innovations. Yet, they also need to be alert to potentially disruptive innovations, which can offer significant new-wealth opportunities or major threats to existing franchises.

Fortunately, the Think Play Do Group's consultants have developed tools and techniques which can help established companies come to grips with disruptive innovation.   Specifically we help organisations develop the capability to:

• assess their susceptibility to disruption innovation(s);
  
• validate their disruptive opportunities;
  
• build new product and service portfolios that both drive and mitigate disruptive innovation.
  

Allocating resources to developing a disruptive innovation capability is simply good leadership practice.  The risk of failing to do so leaves your organisation dependent upon sustaining innovations, which ultimately deliver diminishing returns on investment and eventually a diminishing market presence.