With a career based around engineering and design for the last 20 years I have seen all sorts of technologies & techniques come and go. The scariest for big businesses with established models is the thought that a newcomer can come in with an idea that in the past would have been laughed out of the board room by big business is taken hold of by a start up and turned into its own big business.

We’ve all seen images like the following & if you wound back 5/10 years at any of the businesses they went up against the ideas would have seemed ridiculous.

There is a new wave of ideas coming into all of our industries and if you’re a big business you need to be prepared to not just defend but attack with your own disruptions, gone are the days of large incumbents crushing young upstart companies, these small companies are becoming the big companies of the future.

Businesses like Blockbuster & Kodak didn’t take the disruptive companies seriously enough until it was too late as they were big incumbents and ultimately paid the price.

As businesses we now have 2 choices;