Disrupting the Market

This past week, we discussed competitive analysis and market position.  For Mark’s and my venture, this is tricky.  According to Clayton Christensen, our venture would fall under the category of “new-market disruption” which targets customers who have previously unmet needs – in our case, students with loans and organizations with discrete projects that need to be completed for a modest amount.  Steve Bland says that a new market starts with the hypothesis: “we are creating something that never existed before for customers.” He suggests using the competitive analysis table (featured here: http://steveblank.com/category/market-types/) to show what customers could never have before by comparing our company to groups of products or services.

To gain some inspiration on disruptive innovation, I looked to an article called, “Here comes everybody: Why AirBnB is so disruptive.”

Here are some of the primary points from the article:

·       Businesses like AirBnB markedly lower the barriers to interaction, “to the point where it actually changes the way people behave in some fairly important and disruptive ways.”

·      The scale of the social web is a game changer

·      This isn’t just an “incremental change in human behavior, it is a fundamentally disruptive one” [1]

So, how does this apply to our venture?  Like AirBnB, we’re hoping to dramatically lower the barriers to interaction.  For the law piece of our venture, for example, we hope to provide small and mid-sized firms an opportunity to interact with (and scout) students in a way that they never have before; for students, we hope that our efforts will provide them with an opportunity to gain meaningful work opportunities and experience interacting with employers while in school.

Essentially, we’re both adapting a common brokerage business model and attempting to redefine institutional context.  Next week, we will be making a presentation to people rooted in the status quo by the nature of their jobs but who have been open-minded enough to listen to our idea.  For me, this raises the question: how do we balance getting the information we need from them to honestly consider the attractiveness of this new market while helping them believe in our vision?

[1] http://gigaom.com/2012/09/23/here-comes-everybody-why-airbnb-is-so-disruptive/