Rethinking Innovation Strategy: How to Lead Beyond Disruption in a Post-Crisis Economy
Why Christensen’s insight still matters — and why the next decade demands a broader, deeper strategic lens.
It’s the pattern Clayton Christensen captured so brilliantly — and echoed by countless thinkers since: disruption starts small, outside the incumbent’s field of vision, and eventually rewrites the game.
That playbook shaped how we built, defended, and measured business models for decades.
But something has changed.
In 2025 — and certainly by 2035 — disruption no longer hits product categories alone.
It hits mental models, institutions, identities.
Markets aren’t just shifting. They’re fracturing.
Customers aren’t just switching. They’re redefining value.
And innovation isn’t about novelty anymore.
It’s about relevance under pressure.
This essay explores the emerging patterns I see — not to replace earlier frameworks, but to add the next layer for anyone building what’s next.
From Product Advantage to Paradigm Shift
Earlier disruption theory focused on entering from below: underserved segments, lower performance, higher accessibility.
Today’s disruptors don’t compete on price or performance.
They compete on paradigm and identity.
They question the premise itself:
Why do I need a job?
Why do I need an office?
Why do I need a degree, a boss, a bank, a roadmap…?
The new disruptors don’t just steal market share.
They rewire why the market exists at all.
And by the time these shifts show up in your dashboards, you’re already behind.
For a related perspective on misreading early signals, you might want to read this:
https://innovationand.org/p/why-companies-kill-their-smartest?r=gnh4s
Relevance Is the New Differentiator
The real competitive edge is no longer product innovation.
It’s meaning clarity — and systemic fit.
If people don’t see how your solution helps them make real progress in a changing world, no growth hack will save you.
The strategic questions shift from:
“What do people want?” → “What feels like progress now?”
“What market are we in?” → “What future are we aligned with?”
The patterns emerging today reveal new strategic challenges — and new capabilities organizations need to build.
Here’s where the terrain starts to shift.
1. Disruption Doesn’t Knock at the Door. It Recodes.
Modern disruption often arrives not as a new competitor but as a cultural or behavioral pivot:
From owning to accessing
From competing to coordinating
From control to autonomy
From more to meaningful
The business model doesn’t break because of a performance gap.
It breaks because its logic no longer resonates with the world around it.
For more about this ready “the analysis of shifting opportunity patterns” article:
https://innovationand.org/p/beyond-the-opportunity-landscape?r=gnh4s
2. Jobs to Be Done Needs a Broader Lens
The original JTBD lens helped us move beyond product features toward customer progress.
But in 2025 and beyond, the questions must expand:
Whose progress are we enabling?
At what systemic cost?
For how long?
It’s not enough to understand individual needs.
We must now read the ecological, social, and emotional ecosystems in which these needs arise.
If your solution helps one actor but destabiliues the system they depend on, you’re not solving.
You’re shifting the burden.
For the organizational implications of this, you might be interested in this article:
https://innovationand.org/p/corporate-innovation-readiness-is?r=gnh4s
3. Growth Isn’t the Goal. It’s the Signal.
We were trained to optimize for growth.
But growth has become too ambiguous to stand on its own.
Some growth is noise.
Some growth is extraction.
Some growth is just faster decay.
The real questions now are:
What exactly are we compounding?
What tensions are we ignoring?
Is our growth aligned with the real work people are trying to do?
Without these questions, growth becomes a distraction from relevance.
This also explains why startups often fail long before the revenue dips show up. More in the article: https://innovationand.org/p/why-startups-really-fail-looking?r=gnh4s
4. How to Detect Early Relevance Decay
By the time your revenue slides, your relevance already eroded.
Watch for these early signs:
Language Mismatch
Customers talk about outcomes differently than you do.
Emotional Disengagement
People still use your product, but no longer feel aligned with it.
Silent Talent Flight
Smart people leave, not for better pay — but because the direction no longer resonates.
Mission Leakage
Your organization’s behavior stops matching its stated purpose.
Relevance loss starts soft.
Ignored, it becomes existential.
5. Why Systemic Innovators Will Replace Product Thinkers
The next generation of innovators will not be defined by the ideas they generate.
They will be defined by their ability to work across boundaries.
They will:
spot long-range tensions
make sense of ambiguity
connect user needs with societal shifts
question institutional defaults
redesign incentives, not just interfaces
This work is slower, deeper, harder to measure — and exactly what keeps organisations relevant when the old rules dissolve.
Prompts for Strategic Relevance in 2025 and Beyond
Use these questions with your team, board, or co-founders:
What feels true now, but might not survive the next five years?
What progress are we enabling — and for whom?
What problem are we no longer best suited to solve?
What system failure are we unintentionally contributing to?
What would “evolving in service of relevance” look like here?
Final Thought: Relevance Is a Discipline
This isn’t about abandoning everything we know.
It’s about building on what still serves — while staying honest about what does not.
We don’t need more innovation theatre that shifts resources from A to B, and if the ROI isn’t there, shifts back again.
We need innovation with consequence — because there won’t be an A anymore, but a C, D, E…
That means learning to sense sooner, respond wiser (often slower), and build systems that evolve — not just shift.
P.S. Stuck with this topic and need hands-on help?
Workshops, keynotes, sparring — let’s talk.
I liked how you framed disruption as something that now hits systems, not just sectors. The shift from product advantage to paradigm shift mirrors what we’re seeing in defense too; startups aren’t just building better tools, they’re trying to rebuild the logic of procurement, deterrence, and resilience.
Your point on relevance decay hit especially hard. In reindustrialization, we’re up against the same soft rot: misaligned incentives, language mismatch, and talent flight. Curious how you’d approach keeping a legacy system (like U.S. manufacturing) relevant without falling into the trap of nostalgia-driven innovation.