Spotting Opportunities Others Can’t See

Spotting Opportunities Through The Lens of Disruptive Innovation

Innosight ventures leverages the principles of disruptive innovation, as defined by our founder, Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen. Disruptive innovation theory tells us that most successful companies innovate faster than customers’ lives change. They ultimately end up producing products that are too good, too expensive, and too inconvenient for large segments of customers. In the process, they unwittingly open the door to entrants that can offer simpler, more convenient and lower-cost products and services to those customers who have no need, or lack the means, to keep up with the accelerated pace of innovative change. Innosight Ventures searches for those open doors and runs through them.

To identify customers who will welcome disruptive innovations, we use a “jobs-to-be-done” approach. The jobs-to-be-done theory holds that products are successful when they connect with a circumstance—with a job that customers find themselves needing to get done. Products that make it easier for consumers to do something they are already trying to accomplish become the real “killer applications.”

Innosight Ventures either creates new markets or reshapes existing markets by delivering relatively simple, convenient, low cost innovations to a set of customers who are ignored by industry leaders: