Disruption is an overused word but I find the breadth as well as the depth of disruption right now to be endlessly fascinating. Logical I guess, given how horizontal the impact of digital is, and how the different ways of re-wiring markets can come from such diverse forms of innovation. Digital may change the economics of individual parts of an industry's value chain but in doing so it can unbundle the entire value chain and put it back together again in such a way as to change the whole industry. A classic way for digital to disrupt is to change the way in which a product is sold. Dollar Shave Club, for example, went direct to consumer and disintermediated the retailers but in doing so turned a product into a service.
Digital can also disrupt of-course by bringing the benefit of much greater efficiences to the customer in ways that are hard for incumbent businesses with legacy systems, processes and thinking to do. One of my favourite early stage examples of this is insurance business Lemonade. Lemonade has a simple promise which is shaped around a commitment to 'instant everything'. Their mission is to dramatically simplify the process of insurance (or in digital parlance to significantly shorten customer journeys and remove customer pain points from typically laborious processes):
And they seem to be making a really good go of it. Like the new breed of fintech startups looking to reinvent banking, they are genuinely mobile first and focused on exceptional and intuitive customer experience supported with adept use of AI. Their promise is 90 seconds to get insured and three minutes to get paid. They have a nice CSR angle with all unclaimed money donated to good causes. Late last year they set a world record by settling a claim within three seconds. Now they've introduced the world's first live insurance policy which enables customers to make changes to their coverage in real-time from their phone.
For now the company is focused on homeowners and renters, and are live in a few states in the US but watch them grow. So many incumbent businesses talk about being customer-centric, yet so few genuinely shape their business operations and practices to reflect this promise. All of which leaves room for agile startups like Lemonade to reinvent industry after industry.