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On Strategy: Selling Disruptive Innovations to Senior Management

By Jack Mixner

The 90s words "disruptive technologies" scare me a bit. However, opportunities to take advantage of disruptive advances are clearly available. Patnaik talks about how to receive corporate approval to continue to develop your technology. He talks about setting up three sets of criteria for funding, testing and performance to evaluate incremental, experimental and potentially disruptive innovations - before you come up with a new idea. Having hashed out the criteria in advance allows you to evaluate your new technology against firm criteria and cuts out all the hype associated with selling innovative ideas to senior management.

Strategic Implication for Valuation

When you implement incremental, experimental or disruptive strategies, you increase company valuation. Having a ranking process set up in advance for evaluating technologies saves time, reduces gamesmanship and, most important, increases valuation. References

Patnaik, Dev. The Founder of Jump Associates Offers Five Key Strategies for Managing Change. http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_25/b3989450.htm . June 25, 2006.