What is disruption?
It refers to the process in which a player in the market comes with non-traditional business models that are foolproof compared to their existing products or services or to their competitors who follow the same conventional business models to sustain in the market. These non-conventional business models challenge such products and competitors, thereby replacing them in the industry over a period.
One such example is the Madhubani painting. It comes from a state named Bihar, which is in India, and they are famous for their painting. The unique part of this painting is that it uses local plants for colors and bamboo sticks which are used as a brush. Madhubani painting is famous worldwide for its simplicity and beauty. The paintings are well known for their geometrical designs and patterns, which are used on occasions and festivals.
This is a good example of great innovation, as the art and craft market is vast, but what's next?
Other forms of paintings and designs were giving massive competition to the local artists whose bread and butter was such types of painting. They already catered to the art and culture industry. So they had to do something out of their traditional model, which was painting.
This is where their disruption started when they thought of entering into other industries such as textile, fabrics, and apparel, and now they are not only known for their paintings but also for their designs on clothes, crockeries, and apparel, which gave them a set of new business and helped them acquire more markets.
The below images illustrate not only the business model and disruption but also the design thinking and blue ocean strategy. This made the group more famous on the global level.
Traditional Madhubani Painting
(Conventional Business Model)
Plates Fabrics Bottles
Business Model Disruption from conventional model to non-conventional business model
Design Thinking is a process that helps find a streamlined solution for tackling complex issues and problems that are not known or need to be better designed. This will help understand the customer's needs, redefine the customer needs, create multiple ideas, and create a prototype followed by testing the concept.
Below are the five stages to help solve the customer needs and problems more refinedly.
Empathy
This stage focuses on customer-centricity. As the word suggests, you need to put your feet in the customer's shoes to understand and gain the problem you are trying to solve.
Consultants try to identify the pain points and issues to empathize with the end user. This is a crucial step for finding the solution to the problems.
Let's take an example of the IT industry. A physical environment with separate computing, networking, and security products present as a physical appliance is challenging to manage as you need to have different admins and experts handling such devices, and it also incurs a lot of costs and space.
So in the empathy stage problem of space management, cost and people have been defined.
Define
This stage refers to defining the users' needs and problems. The word here will be how we might solve the end user's problem so that it becomes easy for them to manage their problem.
This will help gather ideas for defining the product and service features for solving the problems a customer is currently facing.
Considering the above example, how might we find a solution for their existing customers so that they can manage the IT environment more efficiently, minimize their operational costs, and manage their space?
Ideate
This stage will help to challenge the assumptions and create ideas. In this stage, once the observations have been analyzed and the designers are ready to generate ideas, the team will start looking at the problems from a different angle to ideate the solutions to the problem. This will help generate multiple ideas for the issues at the start of this stage.
Considering the IT infrastructure example, the idea generated was what if everything could be combined in a single device in the form of virtual machines, which would be easy to manage, and the cost could be minimized using such solutions for their users.
Prototype
In this stage, the team will now have multiple products which will have specific features in those products. The team will further investigate the key performing index to those solutions. This is an experimental stage that will help the designers to find out the best possible solution for the given problem.
That's how Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) came into the picture, which had all the physical servers in a single appliance in the form of virtual machines.
Test
This stage helps to test the prototype, which was designed during the prototype stage. This will help the designers to understand the product to its core for its users.
Traditional 3 Tier Architecture
Hyper-Converged Infrastructure
(Design Thinking)
So using design thinking, all the problems of space, cost, and people were minimized and reduced, and a beautiful product came into existence which helped customers to adapt and manage easily.
This article was contributed by our expert Atirek Aanand
Frequently Asked Questions Answered by Atirek Aanand
Q1. Why do we need design thinking for innovation?
It helps us to inculcate a humanistic approach by empathizing with the problem statement for creating innovative solutions backed by research.
Q2. Why do customers adopt disruptive technology?
They adopt disruptive technology to have a ground in the market, which gives value to their investment.
Q3. What is the goal of disruptive innovation?
The goal of innovative disruption is to create or bring out an innovative solution that does not cannibalize existing products and solutions. But at the same time, they bring out a product or solution that no competitor has to differentiate themselves from their conventional business.
