WhatIsDisruptive

ThoughtStorms Wiki

Over on BillSeitz:z2004-08-10-PickingBestDisruptiveInnovation

Bill says : Hmm, do many people have that many disruptive ideas?

To which I reply :

I think disruptive connects with WorseIsBetter, and I'm pretty sure most people have a lot of "worse" ideas which might be better in certain circumstances. So maybe one heuristic is to look at all the bad / rejected ways you know of doing things and try to imagine a possible world where they might have an advantage. It's CounterThinking again.

And Bill says :

Maybe you're right. At the moment I'm defining "disruptive" as "likely to significantly change the market structure", which seems a pretty high bar. (Contrast to SethGodin's SoftInnovation framing.)

That's interesting. Because intuitively I understood "disruptive" the other way round. Not something that changes market-structure, but something that is a danger to your company because market-structure can't hold it.

And that isn't the whole story either. The constraints of the market, and the fact that it will destroy the structure are both part of it.

But then there's an almighty BANG! as a bunch of neurons start firing at once.

Because this suddenly reminds me of AntiPatterns (in my interpretation derived from ChristopherAlexander.)

An AntiPattern is a pattern which can't contain the forces it creates. And will eventually be torn apart by them.

Possibly those forces will even leak out to damage other patterns in the vicinity.

A DisruptiveTechnology is a technology within a MarketStructure which also generates forces which can't be contained within that structure. And so those forces tear the structure apart. (Normally by destroying the dominant companies.)

Actually, this should earn me BonusFreakyConnectionPoints.