How can disruption of the

The reimagined technology often has little resemblance to the legacy, and often has the appearance of even making the previous disruptive technology appear to be legacy. The melding of old and new into a completely different solution often creates whole new categories of products and services, built upon a base of technology that appears completely different. To those who have been through the first disruption, their knowledge or reference frame seems dated.

There is also a feeling of being unable to keep up. The words are known, but the specifics seem like rocket science. Where there was comfort in the convergence of ideas, the newly reimagined world seems like a whole new generation, and so much more than a competitor. In software, one way to think of this is generational. The disruptors studied the incumbents in university, and then went on to use that knowledge to build a better mousetrap.

Those in university while the new mousetrap was being built benefited from learning from both a legacy and new perspective, thus seeing again how to disrupt. It is often this fortuitous timing that defines generations in technologies. Reimagining is important because the breakthroughs so clearly subsume all that came before.

What characterizes a reimagination most is that it renders the criteria used to evaluate the previous products irrelevant. Often there are orders of magnitude difference in cost, performance, reliability, service and features. Things are just wildly better. A recent example is cloud computing. One would really have to squint in order to claim it is just that, however, as the fundamental innovation in cloud computing delivers entirely new scale, reliability and flexibility, at a cost that upends both of those models.

For the previous incumbent, it is too late. The question then becomes one of building an entirely new product that meets these new criteria, but from within the existing enterprise. The number of times this has been successfully accomplished is diminishingly small, but there will always be exceptions to the rule. For the previous disruptor and new leader, there is a decision point that is almost unexpected.

One might consider the drastic — simply learn from what you previously did, and essentially abandon your work and start over using what you learned.

Or you could be more incremental, and get straight to the convergence phase with the latest technologies. It feels like the ground is moving beneath you. Can you converge rapidly, perhaps revisiting more assumptions, and show more flexibility to abandon some things while doing new things?

Will your product architecture and technologies sustain this type of rethinking? Your customer base is relatively new, and was just feeling pretty good about winning, so the pressure to keep winning will be high. Will you do more than try to recast your work in this new light? Some sincerely believe that products, and thus companies, disrupt and then are doomed to be disrupted.

Business and product development, however, are social sciences. There are no laws of nature, and nothing is certain to happen. There are patterns, which can be helpful signposts, or can blind you to potential actions.

This is what makes the technology industry, and the changes technology bring to other industries, so exciting and interesting. The following table summarizes the stages of disruption and the typical actions and reactions at each stage:. Considering these stages and reactions, there are really two key decision points to be tuned-in to:.

The technology and product team needs to maintain a clinical detachment from the existing body of work to evaluate if something new is better, while also avoiding the more common technology trap of being attracted to the next shiny object. For everyone, timing is everything. We often look at disruption in hindsight, and choose disruptive moments based on product availability or lack thereof.

In practice, products require time to conceive, iterate and execute, and different companies will work on these at different paces. Apple famously talked about the year project that was the iPhone, with many gaps, and while the iPad appears a quick successor, it, too, was part of that odyssey. Sometimes a new product appears to be a response to a new entry, but in reality it was under development for perhaps the same amount of time as another entry.

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All authors read and approved the final manuscript. Correspondence to Annette J. Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Reprints and Permissions. Browne, A. Disruption as opportunity: Impacts of an organizational health equity intervention in primary care clinics. Int J Equity Health 17, Download citation.

Received : 26 October Accepted : 10 July Published : 27 September Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:. Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article. Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative. Skip to main content. Search all BMC articles Search. Download PDF. Research Open Access Published: 27 September Disruption as opportunity: Impacts of an organizational health equity intervention in primary care clinics Annette J.

Lavoie 8 , Sabrina T. Abstract Background The health care sector has a significant role to play in fostering equity in the context of widening global social and health inequities. Results Engagement with the EQUIP intervention prompted increased awareness and confidence related to equity-oriented health care among staff. Conclusions This analysis suggests that organizations should anticipate and plan for various types of disruptions, while maximizing opportunities for ownership of the intervention by those within the organization.

Background Recently, the Institute for Health Care Improvement [ 1 ] released an urgent call for health care organizations to make health equity a strategic priority at all levels. Building on current conceptualizations of health equity [ 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 ], we defined equity-oriented health care EOHC as an approach that aims to reduce: the effects of structural inequities such as poverty , including the inequitable distribution of the determinants of health e.

Overview of the Research Increasingly, leaders in the field of health intervention research are calling for greater attention to studying the process of intervention delivery, and evaluation, in order to understand the intricate human processes that are integral to uptake, delivery, and impact [ 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 ].

Table 2 Descriptions of Each Clinic Full size table.