This EMBA elective focuses on the ingredients to developing new venture strategies that have the potential for disrupting industry incumbents. Generally speaking, industry incumbents get disrupted because existing positional advantages that have protected them against new entrants are neutralized. There are two fundamental ingredients to disruptive new venture strategies. First is the innovative application of new technology. For example, Netflix entered and disrupted Blockbuster in the movie rental industry by taking advantage of the weight and durability of DVDs relative to VHS tapes. Salesforce.com took advantage of the emergence of cloud computing to enter and disrupt the enterprise CRM software industry. Of course, while new technology is often a critical ingredient, it must be incorporated into a new innovative business model (often referred to as business model innovation) – the second ingredient. For example, Netflix leveraged the DVD to create an innovative DVD home delivery service business model. Also, while Uber’s founders cleverly used smartphone technology to automate the traditional taxi dispatch function, just as important was their innovative 2-sided platform-based business model.
These above two critical ingredients to developing disruptive new venture strategies are the basis for successful disruptive new venture strategies along two critical dimensions. First, they create distinctive value for customers in an existing industry. Second, as these new ventures scale their innovative business models, incumbents are faced with the challenge of making fundamental changes to their existing, soon to be obsolete, business models. If incumbents are too slow in making the requisite changes, they lose significant market share, and ultimately, may get completely disrupted.
Finally, from an incumbent’s perspective, avoiding disruption requires getting out in front of the disruptive threat. If they confine their strategy to incremental improvements within their existing business model, they are setting themselves up for disruption. By implication, an incumbent’s strategy development process needs to incorporate the content from this class. They need to understand the future of their industry through the lens of disruptive new ventures, not just their positionally advantaged incumbent lens. Hence, the content in this class applies to both new ventures and incumbents. It’s not just a new venture strategy class.
The academic content will be a combination of concepts and frameworks from competitive strategy, new venture strategy, technology strategy (e.g., Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma), and platform strategy, along with both classic and recent disruption examples/cases (e.g., Netflix, Apple-iPod, Salesforce.com, Uber, Canva, Figma, Resy, Anduril, and more). Finally, given the current “AI revolution”, AI as a technology ingredient to new disruptive entrants will be one of the topics covered.
