Table of Contents

Introduction (13 pages)



Section 1 – The Fundamentals

This section is all about the theory of disruptive innovation – what it is, key concepts, and how to predict whether an innovation is disruptive or not.



Chapter 1: Disruptive Innovation – The Greatest Theory of Business Growth and Value Creation Ever (26 pages)

This chapter is a fast review of disruptive innovation theory, its key attributes, and what it is and isn’t. It covers how the process of disruption plays out in the market and what the result of a successful disruptive innovation is.

1)      Disruptive Innovation – A Simple Definition

2)      Disruption Fingerprint – How to Know If An Innovation Is Disruptive

3)      Anti-Disruption Fingerprint – What Makes an Innovation Not Disruptive

4)      What Market Disruption Looks Like

5)      Financial Impact of Disruptive Innovation (include graph + description of disruption lifecycle)





Chapter 2: Key Concepts of Disruption (32 pages)

The key concepts of disruption describe the characteristics of a product, service, or business model that we want to create or avoid creating in order to build a disruptive innovation. These concepts underpin the strategies that are described in subsequent chapters to create “disruption by design.”

1)      Sustaining vs. Disruptive Products

2)      The Job to Be Done

3)      Good Enough

4)      Competing Against Non-Consumption

5)      Low-End vs. New Market Disruption

6)      Innovation Customers Can Use

7)      Exceeding Market Needs

8)      Sustainable Cost Advantage

9)      The Fight Against Commoditization



Chapter 3: Does Your Idea Have Disruptive Potential? (15 pages)

In this chapter, I look at how to predict whether a product, service, or business model has disruptive potential and how to identify the key factors that increase or decrease the probability of disruption (disruptive strengths and weaknesses).

1)      Predicting Disruption – Why it Matters

2)      Assessing Disruptive Strengths and Weaknesses

3)      Free tools available  



Section 2 – Designed for Disruption: Business Models, and Product and Marketing Strategy

In this section, I present the meat of creating products designed to disrupt markets, articulating why and how the key product and marketing strategies must align, as well as the critical nature of the business model design. Perhaps the most important, overlooked fact about disruptive innovation is that it isn’t a theory about technology. It’s about market adoption, so I spend a significant portion of this section on the marketing concepts that drive disruption.



Chapter 4: What Should My Product Do? (24 pages)

This chapter discusses application of key disruptive concepts to product design. It covers the questions you need to ask and answer, how to identify “white space” opportunities for innovation, and how to assess whether or not product ideas have disruptive potential. I also discuss how to gain insight into what people are likely to buy and prefer.

1)      Finding a Job That Needs to Be Done

2)      Identifying Alternatives – How Is the Job Done Now?

3)      Dimensions for Innovation

4)      Which Alternatives Have Disruptive Potential?

5)      Can We Obtain a Unique or Patentable Advantage?

6)      What People Will Buy



Chapter 5: Segmentation (22 pages)

Disruptive segmenting is largely about identifying the most compelling uses and the users who will achieve the greatest value from your product. You need to find the customers who are so engaged and thrilled with your product that they identify with it and feel an emotional attachment to it. They can’t help promote it to others.

1)      What Assumptions Are Embedded in Your Product?

2)      Identifying the Best Market Segments to Gain Traction

3)      Why You Must Know the Total Addressable Market, But Stay Focused on Key Segments

4)      Avoiding Incumbent Solutions’ Bread-and-Butter Areas



Chapter 6: Positioning (24 pages)

When you position a product, you are telling the market who you want to be compared with, and why you are the best solution to solve the customer’s problem. Identifying with the customer’s “job to be done,” rather than with a product category, tends to uniquely position why you are the only or the best solution, which is a critical step to disrupting any market. This chapter describes how to accomplish that.

1)      Choosing Your Competition

2)      Identifying Where You Fit in the Market

3)      Sidebar Discussion: Can You be a Sustaining and Disruptive Innovator Simultaneously? Why Positioning Correctly Is Critical to Disruptive Market Success

4)      Value Proposition vs. Alternatives

5)      A Disruptive Positioning Statement



Chapter 7: Pricing Strategy (18 pages)

Market disruptions most often begin with underserved customers at the low end of the market who can’t afford (or choose not to afford) currently available alternatives to address their needs. Pricing strategy is thus critical to creating disruption. If your innovation carries a sustainable cost-of-production advantage, and you use it to price below all available alternatives, you will have a significant advantage in the market. An order-of-magnitude (10x) cost advantage will almost always create market disruption, even with a radically inferior product. This chapter covers pricing strategy and the growth implications of your approach.

1)      Reference Pricing

2)      Assessing the Price Curve Over Time

3)      Cost-based Pricing vs. Value-based Pricing

4)      The Freemium Option

5)      Does the Price You Need to Sell for Limit Market Size?

6)      Can You Sell for Less?



Chapter 8: Messaging (15 pages)

Messaging is about empathy, and nowhere is this more important than when describing the key benefits of a disruptive innovation. Tech companies, in particular, get excited when they think they have a disruptive innovation, and they are far too eager to promote it that way. Customers don’t want to be disrupted, however, and no customer will ever say, “I want to buy a disruptive innovation.” But they do like novel ways to solve their problems. This chapter walks through the process of extracting the key messages you need to promote your innovation to ensure it has a chance of winning in the market. 1)      Remember the Job to Be Done

2)      Benefits vs. Features and Advantages

3)      Putting Yourself in Your Target Buyer’s Shoes

4)      Disruption Is Not a Customer Benefit



Chapter 9: Your Business Model (14 pages)

Even if all else is right, the business model can sink a potentially disruptive innovation if it doesn’t align with the market. This chapter applies tools to diagram your business model, focusing on the elements most important to achieving disruption. Importantly, the overall business model for a disruptor will usually look nothing like it would for an established incumbent, upsetting everything from the price model to the value chain and how the product is distributed. We discuss why.

1)      What a Business Model Is

2)      Ensuring Your Model Stays Disruptive  



Section 3 – The Last Mile

By now, you have completed all the necessary steps to design a product with high disruptive potential. But you still aren’t finished. You need to launch it in the market, develop your customers, establish product/market fit, refine your assumptions based on feedback, reach the disruptive pinnacle, and then figure out how to stay there—because there are numerous startups ready to dethrone you with the next disruption. This section is about what to do when you’re ready to go to market, and how to handle disruptive success.



Chapter 10: Launch (20 pages)

You want to hit the ground running when you’re ready to put your product in the hands of customers, but that’s tough if they don’t know who you are, don’t understand why they need your product, or how it’s different from all that’s out there. It’s all about speed now, as the next potential disruptor with a solution similar to yours might be just a few weeks or months behind. This chapter describes preparing for launch, and the next few months after.

1)      Things You Need to Be Doing to Prepare for Launch on Day 1

2)      Customer Development

3)      Lean Startup Approach

4)      Establishing Product/Market Fit

5)      The Network Effect – Do You Have Viral Potential?



Chapter 11: Disruption and Staying on Top (22 pages)

Finally, your product is in the market, you’re signing new customers, growing, and maybe you've even reached profitability. You don’t feel like you’ve achieved market disruption though, and you probably haven’t. Even the biggest hit products of our time, such as the iPod and iPhone, took a few years to firmly establish their market dominance. So, now what? You need to develop a set of indicators that confirm progress and highlight problem areas while you are establishing early successes in niche segments, and then growing to displace incumbent solutions. If you’ve done everything well enough to succeed at disruption, you have an even bigger challenge to face: complacency. This final chapter discusses how to stay alert and recognize that disruption may be coming to you next, and what to do about it. Case Study: RIM/Blackberry.

1)      Disruption Is a Process, Not an Event

2)      The Disruption Curve

3)      How Do You Know Whether You Are Achieving Disruptive Take Off?

4)      Expanding to Adjacent Market Segments

5)      Signs You are Stalling – You Still Need to “Cross the Chasm”

6)      Disruption Accomplished: Now What’s Next?  



Appendix: Disrupters Test and Additional Case Studies (20 pages)

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