The View from Harvard Business

Disruptive Innovation: Sending a Beer Cooler Into Space for $150

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Innovation
Strategy

Spending just $150, two MIT students recently launched what amounted to a styrofoam beer cooler equipped with a camera and GPS tracker to a height of 93,000 feet at the edge of space. That's Long Island in the photo at left. Pass the Budweiser.

Great stunt, but so what?

Innovation expert John Sviokla takes inspiration from the simple creativity showed by the students to draw up a disruptive technology toolkit.

"Not only is this story inspirational to someone like me ... but it points out how the minimum efficient scale of doing fantastic things is getting orders of magnitude lower in some industries. This lower cost of entry can be magnified and accelerated when you have someone come to the design problem with an entirely new set of expectations."

In other words, its becoming much easier to compete against the big boys.

Ready to get started down the road of disruption? Here are four ideas to chew on.

Simultaneously simplify a number of advantages together to create a new cost base.
Give away the other guy's razor.
Look for new, radically cheaper ways to do the job.
Think about leveraging a very few individuals with extraordinary talent.

Read Sviokla's full post on Harvard Business Publishing, Getting Started with Disruptive Business Design. My favorite example of disruptive process change (No. 3) is UPS' long-running right turn doctrine. Routes are planned to make as few left turns as possible. No special technology or training needed. The company claimed in 2007 that the process helped it save 28.5 million miles, and three million gallons of fuel. What's in your Disruptive Innovation Toolkit?

posted by Sean Silverthorne
October 27, 2009 @ 10:22 am

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