Disruption is where the existing market for a business is radically changed through new competition. This can either be through new companies entering traditional markets such as Uber, Airbnb or Amazon overturn the taxi, hotel and bookstore markets. Be it can also be disruption from radically new products such as the famous iPhone overturning the older existing mobile market players such as Nokia and Blackberry. To some extent this is incremental disruption where previous generations of products are superseded like the Betamax , VHS, CD, cloud apps to music streaming. The same has gone for digital payments from contactless to blockchain technologies, it's just new ways to deliver the same thing.
A third disruption is in the very nature of the product or market itself being reinvented of a completely new kind of market offering. Steve Jobs was famously noncommittal about Mobile apps initially not seeing their value, but they soon rapidly become the way of a new category of service and market. Blockchain has the potential to diversify into other uses such as contract authorization management or other as yet
unforeseen uses. But new kinds of technology such as Artificial intelligence, robotics or virtual reality are seen as new ways that did not exist before changing whole industries, jobs, markets and productivity
from connected self-driving cars such as Google and others; automated retail in Amazon Go or the connected home appliances of Echo Alex are just the tip of the way new things could come to be.
They change companies behavior as new customer and old customers change their buy patterns, they challenge through innovation or sheer brute force of new ideas the way that they much change their business model or diminish or perish.
Can companies buy their way into disrupt either to protect their existing market customer base with new ideas and offers or to attack new markets happens everywhere. The biggest issues are
How large cloud companies like google, facebook, amazon. Microsoft and others may buy out start-ups to capture future competitors before they become a threat to their business such as WhatsApp purchase by Facebook.
Another can be in draining talent or stiffing innovation through intellectual property legal battles. Companies like Thirdly is how to develop a Mergers & Acquisition strategy that can capture the market or a country key companies such as the ARM Holding acquisition by Softbank. In this case it not so much capturing the market leader to disrupt, but using co-investment to leverage future growth. Deepminds acquisition by google still preserved the Deepmind business with new levels of investment, but enabled more funds to grow this capability. With this is seen as competitively disrupting the market depends on how to develop innovation and investment funding that supports viable business models.
Companies like P&G, Unilever to MasterCard and Visa and many others use open innovation to develop ideas to seek new ways of doing business but these may be operational improvements. True disruption is the radical "gamechangers" that are admired by the likes of Tesla or Apple but all these, even the disrupters, are by definition will be disrupted as well with new things. Disruption planning is the new board strategy to plan for the future. This can be through organic growth of ideas but can be through aggressive and timely acquisition. The biggest challenge is the "founder dilemma" for incumbent company's to be able to learn that the model that made them great may no longer be the future. From the MySpace to Nintendo, there are many examples that could not change fast enough to maintain their future in the same growth.
Disruption is getting faster with digital technologies but also new emerging ethical and social and environmental pressures are coming forward creating new issues in addition to the economic threats and opportunities of new replacing the old. Governments have to protect these changes, the UK government new laws on acquisitions oversight and conditions are in place to ensure ARM and Softbank honor the agreements. Governments also ironically have to develop new investment strategies to encourage inward innovation and job creation investment mechanisms. Disruption is the "new norm".