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Source: Accenture<\/em><\/p>\nThe shark fin encapsulates the shift from business evolution driven by incremental technologies to big-bang disruption powered by exponential technologies. Its shape reflects the new economics of information: the declining cost of innovation, the declining cost of information and the declining cost of experimentation. Together, they have shortened and skewed the lifecycle of industry change.<\/p>\n
Big-bang disruption demands a new approach to strategy and planning, one that is different not in degree but in kind. The nature of interactions with competitors, customers and supply-chain participants will be drastically altered. Every business function is affected. Survival depends on new leadership and new ways of thinking.<\/p>\n
The singularity Big-bang disruption happens because experimentation has become both low-cost and low-risk, increasingly by using a wide range of new, often off-the-shelf component technologies. But it typically takes many failed attempts before the right combination is found and proven to be cost effective. And failed early experiments often lull incumbents into concluding disrupters are not ready for prime time.<\/p>\n Enter the truth-tellers, industry experts with profound insights into new technologies and customer behaviours, who can predict when small tremors signal imminent earthquakes.<\/p>\n Truth-tellers speak a strange language, one that isn\u2019t focused on incremental change and the next quarter\u2019s results. Finding them isn\u2019t easy. Learning to listen to them is harder.<\/p>\n The big bang A big-bang disruption, once created, enters the mass market at ultra-high speed. Instead of a predictable process of selling to discrete, sequential market segments, big-bang disrupters need worry only about two main categories of users: what we call trial users, and everybody else. In this stage, the goal is selling to everybody else \u2014 and fast.<\/p>\n The sudden success of big-bang disrupters is driven by easy access to market opinion, facts and comparison data, which creates something ever closer to consensus market opinion. The availability of near-perfect market information means consumers make fewer mistakes. They don\u2019t buy a mediocre product simply because manufacturers invest in more advertising. They wait until the right version \u2014 of a smartphone, 3D television, electric car \u2014 emerges. Almost-there versions don\u2019t sell poorly \u2014 they don\u2019t sell at all.<\/p>\n Maintaining an intimate connection to trial users \u2014 the co-developers and, thanks to crowdsourcing services such as Kickstarter, co-funders \u2014 is therefore critical. Take, for example, the \u201csmart home\u201d initiative of consumer electronics company Belkin International. Known as WeMo, the smartphone and tablet app was designed to enable users to create specific commands for on\/off switches of basic home functions and electronics, such as lights. The company solicits and publishes user ideas for commands on its website, and when commands become popular enough \u2014 such as \u201cIf The Weather Channel says the sun has set, then have WeMo switch on the lights\u201d \u2014 Belkin integrates them into the app\u2019s default list of commands for all WeMo users.<\/p>\n
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