Creating something truly new to build a business upon is hard. It takes real imagination to imagine what hasn’t been imagined before!
Fortunately, many great fortunes have been made by rethinking a business that is well established or in decline.
Examples are Ubers disrupting taxis, Airbnb invading the hotel market, the minicomputer (remember Digital Equipment?) disrupting the large mainframe business (IBM) and then the personal computer (IBM and others) disrupting Digital Equipment and on and on.
Sometimes just repackaging or reconfiguring a prior innovation can create a new product. To wit, The graphic below tracks the remarkable growth of the digital camera….until the smart phone arrived. All that Android and Apple had to do was put the existing product, the camera, inside a new one: the smart phone. You could now have several devices repackaged into one that was the same size or smaller than any of the ones it replaced with far more utility.
Can you repackage or reconfigure something old into something new? It’s one way to avoid disruption.
