Preparing For Disruptive Innovation

“We have to change the way we’re doing things. And that starts, we fervently believe, with innovation.”

These comments come from the foreword to a Deloitte report on the future of Canada’s mining industry. Although slanted towards the mining industry, the foreword and the report are packed with insights on innovation and the impact of disruptive innovation which would equally apply to any other industry.

Comments about disruption and exponential change, about innovation being critical to the survival and sustainability of industry and about the tipping point being reached which leaves industry with no option other than to change can equally be applied to the majority of business sectors.

Interestingly, the report comments that only about 12% of all Canadian companies understand what’s coming in terms of disruptive change and we wouldn’t be surprised if this figure was reflected across the industrialized world.

One area of particular interest within the report is the breakdown of innovation ambitions into transformational, adjacent and core. The report comments that 70% of returns from innovation investment relate to transformational innovation, with 20% coming from adjacent and 10% from core. It also highlights the relationship between the innovation mix and returns, with top innovators being shown to outperform the S&P 500 by a significant margin.