Disrupt: Think the Unthinkable to Spark Transformation in Your Business

Product Author Bios

Luke Williams is a leading consultant, speaker, and educator in the areas of innovation strategy and disruptive thinking. For more than a decade, he has worked internationally with industry leaders like American Express, Sony, General Electric, Crocs, Virgin, Disney, and Hewlett-Packard, to develop new business models, products, services, and brands.

Williams is a Fellow at frog design--one of the most influential innovation companies in the world--and an Adjunct Professor of innovation at NYU Stern School of Business. He speaks throughout the international community, and his opinions have been featured in BusinessWeek, Fast Company, and The Wall Street Journal.

For more and more companies in a world that's changing fast, there’s only one way to win the game: transform it entirely. For anyone who wants to thrive in this new order, this requires a revolution in thinking--a steady stream of disruptive strategies and unexpected solutions. Disrupt: Think the Unthinkable to Spark Transformation in Your Business shows how to generate and execute those solutions--a disruptive approach for a disruptive age.

Author Luke Williams demonstrates his experience creating disruptive products and services at frog design, one of the world’s leading innovation firms. Williams combines the fluid creativity of "disruptive thinking" with the analytical rigor that is indispensable to business success. The result is a simple yet complete five-stage process for imagining a powerful market disruption and transforming it into reality.

Using many examples and a book-length case study of Little Miss Matched, Williams shows how the more unexpected an idea, the smaller the number of competitors, and the more successful the company that brings it to market. He walks through generating a disruptive hypothesis, defining a disruptive market opportunity, creating multiple disruptive ideas, shaping them into an actionable solution, and persuading key stakeholders to adopt or invest in the solution.

Disrupt offers readers a systematic way to redefine the future of a company, catch entire industries by surprise, and leave competitors scrambling to catch up.

Table of Contents

Introduction     1

Disruptive Thinking:

    The Revolution is in Full Swing

PART I: The Hypotheses, the Opportunity, and the Ideas

Chapter 1     16

Crafting a Disruptive Hypothesis:

     Be Wrong at the Start, to be Right at the End

Chapter 2     38

Discovering a Disruptive Opportunity:

     Explore the Least Obvious

Chapter 3     76

Generating a Disruptive Idea:

     Unexpected Ideas Have Fewer Competitors

PART II: The Solution and the Pitch

Chapter 4     106

Shaping a Disruptive Solution:

     Novelty for Novelty’s Sake is a Resource Killer

Chapter 5     142

Making a Disruptive Pitch:

     Under Prepare the Obvious, Over Prepare the Unusual

Epilogue     171

An Instinct for Change:

     Look Where No One Else is Looking

Quick Reference Guide     173

Process Summary

Endnotes     183

Index     191