Managing Digital Disruption and Achieving Innovation for Your Business

Technology is changing the way consumers interact with products and services, accelerating the rate at which disruptions occur and making innovation essential.

Technology is evolving at an ever-increasing pace. New technologies and innovations continue to be developed, transforming industries across the spectrum from banking to healthcare. As a result, the rules for disruption have been rewritten; what was once a long-term occurrence is now commonplace, occurring in months or even weeks.

Digital Disruption: The What, Why, and How

Industries are changing almost as fast as the underlying technology driving them. This means that business disruption, a once laborious goal taking a decade or more to accomplish, is becoming not only common but the norm. For companies to stay relevant, achieving disruption, and building the digital product development innovations that fuel it, is a non-negotiable.

What Is Digital Disruption?

Disruption involves taking the foundations of a business and replacing them with new ones. Digital disruption, then, is the ability to adapt to digital change. How consumers experience technology is continually changing, and businesses need to identify what this technology can do to create change for their customers as well as within their organization.

How To Disrupt An Industry

In today’s fast paced world, disruption itself has been disrupted. What was once a tedious and expensive process spanning decades has been altered irrevocably. In today’s digital arena, industry-wide disruption is not only possible, but also efficient and affordable. Disrupting an industry can now happen over the course of a year, if not weeks or months. Almost every industry is now susceptible to massive restructuring of norms, and businesses must innovate to remain competitive.

At Praxent, we advocate that the best way to do this is to disrupt yourself. Someone else is already disrupting the way the customer is doing things, and if you don’t take that information and utilize it to disrupt your business, it’s pretty much guaranteed that someone else will.

Managing Digital Disruption: 5 Steps to Start Innovating

You know you need to disrupt to keep your business relevant and competitive, but how do you go about it? Design thinking of this type can sometimes feel heavy, especially when getting started, and there are a few common challenges to managing digital disruption:

• Resistance To Innovation: It can be hard to change longstanding mindsets and processes, or to “sell” an idea to the existing business.
• Scope Of Work: The perceived amount of UX work required to innovate often seems high, which can stop a project before it even starts.
• Selectivity: Innovation and disruption are sometimes reserved for the most strategic or high-priority efforts, meaning smaller opportunities can be overlooked.
• Shortcuts: Cutting corners for cost or time can lead to unclear direction, resulting in confusion or hazy direction in development.

To achieve the innovation necessary to disrupt an industry, alignment and team cohesion within your organization are key.

5 Ways To Make Innovation Part Of Company Culture (And a Viable Part At That)

The budget and time necessary for business disruption are no longer prohibitive. But you still have to work at innovation, while continuing to “sell” your product at the end of the day.

• Accomplish goals with minimal investment
• Drive alignment and support across entire enterprise

In today’s business environment it’s easier to test, get real market feedback, and make decisions in shorter time periods than ever. Here are 5 methods to kickstart the innovation needed for disrupting an industry.

Method 1: Proto Personas

Quickly document a best guess of your target buyer’s needs and goals, based mostly on assumptions. Proto personas encompass feelings and behaviors in a single scenario, enabling you to make more thoughtful decisions.

>> Learn how to easily create and use personas that help you identify the most successful path to innovation.

Method 2: Journey Mapping

Break down a users’ feelings across a process to identify pain points and prioritize areas for innovation. Look for areas that resonate well, areas that contain challenges, and areas of opportunity to help get to market-differentiating features that would disrupt an industry.

Method 3: Sketching Exercise

Make leaps in ideation to move past bad ideas and align on the best ones. Using a fast and simple exercise allows everyone to contribute to the creative process and produce visual ideas.

Method 4: Drive-Thru Research

Empower more people to easily participate in user research while garnering the insights you need. Engage participants at their convenience with fast, on-the-go research methods that are both flexible and approachable.

Method 5: Guerrilla Research

Get outside and gather cheap, easy insights in a way that’s fast and flexible. This scrappy feedback collection method can be done at any stage and location, and is key to managing digital disruption as it helps identify problems that could cost you down the road.

5 Tools for Fostering Practical Innovation

Learn more about the value each method provides, plus actionable tactics to implement them, in our free Field Manuel To Rapid Innovation.

>> Access tools and ready-to-use templates. Download the field manual here.