Bite-size Case Study

Successful disruption: Sony

Published on January 30, 2022 Originally recorded 2021   5 min
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What is disruption? Disruption - there's two real definitions to disruption. One is the dictionary definition, and that dictionary definition is very simple. It's a negative. In that negative, disruption means to stop an event, a process, a system from happening as it should usually do. That in itself, is straightforward, but the business definition, what have we done? We changed this negative into a positive. What we now have for the business definition is a change of the industry for the positive, and that change actually means the whole industry evolves. However, many people use the word disruption for many different things. They suggest that Apple is a disruptor, they suggest that Uber is a disruptor, they suggest that Amazon has been a disruptor. Those things have disrupted the competition, but they haven't fundamentally changed industries in the way that we're looking at it. What was an interesting way of looking at disruption instead of just looking at another word for innovation, creativity, or progress, or change, is actually Dell. Dell disrupted the way computers were sold. They were the first to do this. It was so normal, so every day, so traditional in the way of thinking in real terms. What they said is, we've got computers. They go online. Why don't we sell them online? That changed fundamentally how the industry works. If we think about things now, when the World Wide Web was invented, it's allowed us to do many things. We have people called the digital natives now. Is there anything that we can do now that we could not do before? I'm not going to pause for a big answer and all the rest of it, but fundamentally, there's not. What it has allowed us to do is let us do things more quickly, and that's going to be key.