According Gartner“Digital disruption is an effect that changes fundamental expectations and behaviors in a culture, market, industry, or process that is caused by, or expressed through, digital capabilities, channels, or assets.”
It is here where the development of digital technologies drives change, understanding digital technologies as indicated by K. Johnson to all the electronic or digital tools, automatic systems, technological devices and resources that generate, process or store information converted to the binary system, that is, zero or one, where each bit is the symbol of two amplitudes.
Such is the relevance of digital technologies in a process of digital disruption that without their existence this type of disruption would be impossible. Here are seven key elements of digital disruption:
- Change: it is vital to always be open to change. Do not rule out any type of emerging innovation no matter how irrelevant or distant it may seem. Remember that very few executives in the 1990s envisioned a world where e-commerce, smartphones, and social media were going to be a structural part of our lives.
- Movement: start taking visible and viable measures that modify the current business model and lead it to the new scenario, before your competition reacts. You must act strategically when signs of change first emerge in the way consumers are going to satisfy their needs.
- Future: make intensive use of data and big data to discover and meet the customer of the future. Strongly consumer-oriented companies gain privileged access to their customers like IKEA, Amazon and Apple. Anticipating what the consumer will need in the future is a source of unbeatable competitive advantage.
- Price: Virtually every major digital disruption drives down costs. By entering with low prices, a large critical mass of customers is attracted, thus expanding the knowledge and influence of the new disruptive business, thus hindering competition from established rivals with classic business models.
- Efficiency: design a business model that makes efficient use of underutilized assets. A clear example of this is Airbnb and Uber.
- Technology: think of platform business solutions and thus facilitate the scalability of the new business. as it says Gartner, “Platforms exist on many levels. They range from high-level platforms that enable a platform business model to low-level platforms that provide a collection of business and/or technology capabilities that other products or services consume to deliver their own business capabilities.
- Job: seeks new ways of working, where space for collaboration and creativity are important and in this way workers can combine skills focused on business strategy, user experience, customer experience and technological development of hardware and software.
In short, digital disruption typically seeks to make things easier, less complex, faster, and at the lowest monetary cost for the customer.