A disruptive innovation is an innovation that creates a new market and value network and eventually disrupts an existing market and value network, displacing established market leaders and alliances.
Mr. Ramesh Ponnuvelu, CEO of Kaspon Techworks an alumnus of Madras Institute of Technology (MIT), Chennai, with over two decades of experience in Sales, Marketing, Product Management and Technology Consulting Services has a bachelor degree in Mathematics (B.Sc) from University of Madras and went on to complete B.Tech from Madras Institute of Technology, Anna University. He joined HCL in 1991 through campus placement. As a sales professional at HCL, he had a very successful and rewarding career in key account management. He then moved to Product Management during the latter part of his career with HCL and he was also a key member of HCL’s task force, which launched a very successful mass-market PC campaign code named OCTOPUS during the mid-nineties. As a Product Manager, he was spearheading product packaging, merchandising, pricing, channel orientation and marketing communication. Mr. Ramesh Ponnuvelu’s discussion on disruptive innovation was very interesting throughout the session.
What we learnt
Disruptive innovation is one which creates phenomenal opportunities which will change the business, products.
Examples given were typewriters-> computers-> telegram-> fax-> email
Change is the only thing that never changes and now it keeps happening at an accelerated pace. There were many constant challenges to the industries. The live example quoted by him was the leaders of photocopy machines-Xerox which had a crisis when the photocopy machines became irrelevant due to printers. Mr. Bill wanted to convert into a document management company. But the management was afraid to lose its revenue of about $6 billion which comes through product sales. But later document management took over photocopy.
To pursue these disruptive technologies, leaders must look beyond the process that are geared to serving the main stream. Most companies vanish due to not taking disruptive innovation.
Policy makers should have a clear understanding on how technology might shape the global economy over the coming decade. Invest in new forms of education to figure out how disruptive innovation will affect competitive advantage.
As the discussion went deeper he told us about the potential disruptive technologies known as SMAC.
- Social media: Lot of micro social sites (e.g.) social sites for doctors, chartered accountants etc.
- Mobile: It gives information availability in every place globally. Mobile banking, ticket booking. There are lots of innovations in mobile. In Japan T.V can also be watched through mobiles.
- Analytics: Marketing was a mass communication in the past but it nowadays context based is very important. Analytics helps in pushing the products. It also helps to drive business in new ways.
- Cloud: Software and hardware resources delivered over network or the internet.
- IOT [Internet of Things]: Nowadays most of the things use IOT can be a big revolution. Apple’s thought of bringing day to day activities using devices is an example.
Autonomous vehicles which are a disruptive innovation pose a threat to players like Maruti, Tata.
In the health care sector there is an explosion due to new apps which can collect and give report to user about his health condition.
He concluded saying that it is a great opportunity for B School graduates as it is the era for new technologies to breakthrough, disruptive innovation helps in creating opportunities and also help in creating more output using less output.
We thank Ramesh Ponnuvelu for sharing his experience and we from Chennai Business School hope to meet him often.
– Vignesh R (CBS 2015-16 Batch)