CHAPTER 3

Does Your Idea Have Disruptive Potential?

Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.

—Aristotle

Logically, disruptive innovation shouldn’t be possible.

Think about it: A small, underfunded startup with ideas that one or more larger companies reject as being inferior or having too small a market to care about comes from nowhere to upset the old order. Once a disruption has taken hold, the larger, established company—with ready access to billions of dollars, thousands of people, world-class research teams, control of distribution channels, and immense marketing resources—is unable to fight back while the disruptor takes control of the market and becomes the new dominant incumbent.

Yet, Aristotle understood ...

Get Disruption by Design: How to Create Products that Disrupt and then Dominate Markets now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.