The Innovator's Guide to Growth: Putting Disruptive Innovation to Work

CHAPTER 5

Developing Disruptive Ideas

SOME MANAGERS BELIEVE there is no way to guide the innovation journey, because innovation is just random and unpredictable. If innovation is indeed a black box, the best that companies can do is let a thousand flowers bloom, in the hope that one of them sprouts into a substantial growth business. This is a bit like releasing a thousand monkeys into a room full of word processors and hoping they’ll produce Shakespeare. If you are lucky enough to have it happen once, you surely wouldn’t expect it to be repeatable.

Research over the past two decades has shown that many successful strategies for new growth actually adhere to a specific pattern. As detailed in this book’s introduction, strategies based ...