“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” Leo Tolstoy thoughts about the need to disrupt yourself first, then your business and industry.

1. …first, disrupt yourself!
“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of
changing himself.” Leo Tolstoy
By: Felipe Afanador Cortés
August of 2017
Barcelona, Spain

2. nnovation has become the key element or concept for today’s business success.
Nonetheless, innovation is a mindset, a philosophy, not a strategy or a tactic,
neither a process. This means that is difficult to replicate, define and to master. It is
an intangible that help you create tangible things, therefore is hard to frame. Companies
are very bad at copying intangibles, but very good at buying and selling companies. For
example, big corporations are better at working in incremental innovation, instead of
disruptive ideas that will transform an industry.
Innovation, it’s also a broad term, with multiple definitions and perspectives. For
example, the Innovation matrix, that define 4 types: breakthrough, sustaining, basic and
disruptive. Nowadays, open innovation has been called the best way to innovate from
within big corporations. Let’s recall that innovation to happen requires observation,
knowledge, a clear opportunity and tons of constrains. In modern business literature,
most of the cases and examples related to innovation are about failures of big
corporations and big wins from small and medium companies disrupting any given
market. However, innovation has become a commodity, everyone is doing innovation
to justify modernism and a long-term view. Nevertheless, innovation could be seen as a
skill or an enabler to create competitive advantage and create new markets. This means
that innovation is a resource that will create capabilities, that will produce a competitive
advantage, that will change the company’s value and its mindset.
The above thoughts are mainly focus in organizations, but if anyone start to dig in,
innovation is about people, thinking processes. It’s about observation, linking the dots
and finding a solution efficient and effective to any given problem. People is at the core
of the innovation process.
If this is true, another question emerges: How and why anyone could disrupt him myself
to be more innovative? From the smallest cell, the individual perspective, to be valuable
in a high competitive market, innovation is a relevant skill to sell, but a hard one to
prove. Innovation is not predictable. Just because you were successful in past ventures,
I

3. it doesn’t mean you are a disrupter or an innovative individual. Is better to identify
values around thinkers that are continuously questioning about how to change the
status quo, how to do things different, how to create and connect different ideas, the
capacity to observe and produce conclusions, people that is asking why and why not,
individuals that are curious and have the ability of unlearn old things and learn new
things, anyone that is able to do things different, people that is able to find the invisible
lines between things, individuals that find the structures and the networks to
accomplish.
Creativity is highly correlated to innovation, because is related to new things, but they
have different meanings. Creativity is more of a verb – a process-, than an adjective. As
a process of the human intelligence to merge ideas and create new tangible or intangible
ones, it could be learned and improve. For example, design thinking is a great tool to
help individuals to be more creative, within organizations. The most well-known
innovation firm, IDEO, suggest a model for innovation: Understand the environment,
observe real people, visualize the customers, evaluate and refine the prototype and
implement the new concept for commercialization. Thus, there are framework to work
with to create new things, within organization, but little to apply to an individual level.
Some could argue that this framework could apply to individuals, however individuals
are the catalyst to innovation, therefore the input and the output is different. For
example, to disrupt oneself, the process must be around motivations and passions and
link them with that individual´s competitive advantage. A place where no one else is
playing. Sometimes, identifying this takes time and effort, but it’s worth the journey.
The whole point about disrupting oneself is identifying the purpose and the key core
competences to work with. In order words, find a niche where your insights are strong
enough to make you think about the status quo and the things around you. To do this,
assess your internal value chain, to understand your inputs, processes or value added,
and your outputs. By creating a disruptive map, it will help you to navigate the process.
This is a map that will show who you are today and who you want to be and how you
are assessing that gap from a disrupting perspective.

4. Disruptors look to meet needs by occupying niches that employ their distinctive strength
and competitive advantage for a major objective. As South African called it: Ubuntu -
"the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity”- Finally, our
purpose is to contribute to the time we live in by reinventing ourselves and our world.