Google (GOOG 1.43%) (GOOGL 1.42%) and Apple (AAPL 0.51%) are on the short list of the top disruptive companies of our lifetime. But Paul Nunes, who has studied businesses for decades, says either of these excellent companies can themselves be disrupted – and virtually overnight, at that.
Nunes is executive director of research at Accenture's Institute for High Performance, and co-author of Big Bang Disruption: Strategy in the Age of Devastating Innovation. I chatted with him at the 2014 International CES in Las Vegas about Google and other top-tier tech giants, and what they have to watch out for in order to maintain their dominance.
His book is an eye-opener, pointing out how rapidly things have changed in the tech world. No longer do most businesses follow the traditional bell curve when it comes to market adoption of their products and services. Instead, as you see in the image below, the move from the earliest innovators and adopters to the final laggards fittingly resembles a shark fin.
I asked Nunes which business model – Google or Apple's – was more likely to be disrupted. He noted that both are strong but each could be disrupted through a combination of their own complacency and the new "sharks" swimming around in their industries, pushing out new products with great speed. Some of these products will hit an exponential, nearly vertical, growth phase.
Nunes explains more in the video below, and about a company that wasn't quite ready for prime time when its product jumped to the top of the shark fin.
