Welcome to the second part of our two-part series, “The Basics of Finding New Sources of Business.” In Part 1 of this series, we explored various ways to grow your business, including increasing customer spend, diversifying, and increasing market share.

In this part, we seek to inspire more ideas for driving growth through disruptive innovation, alliances, and partnerships. Then we wrap up this series by taking a quick look at how to analyze your company’s strengths so you can leverage them to grow in the right direction.

As we explained in Part 1, growth is essential not only for a business to succeed but, more important, for its very survival. As the old saying goes, “If you’re not growing, you’re dying,” and that’s especially true for small businesses. If you’re not actively pursuing customers, a competitor will be chipping away at your consumer base until the entire foundation of your business crumbles. This series might inspire you, but only you can do the difficult and creative work to make growth happen.

Growth Through Disruptive Innovation

One great way to quickly grow a business is through disruptive innovation — introducing a new product or service to a market that makes traditionally successful products or services in that market obsolete.

Two familiar examples of disruptive innovation

Here are a couple examples of disruptive innovation that you’ll probably recognize:

• The first digital cameras were low on functionality and didn’t match the quality of traditional film cameras. The leading camera manufacturers, including Kodak, continued to manufacture and market cameras that used film. This of course left a massive opening for smaller consumer electronics manufacturers to nearly supplant their larger and more entrenched counterparts. Since then, smartphones have made traditional digital cameras nearly obsolete.
• In its early days, Amazon.com disrupted traditional bookstores, using the Internet and traditional delivery services to make it far more convenient and less expensive to purchase books. It has continued to disrupt the publishing industry with its Kindle reader and self-publishing services, making it possible for authors to publish and sell directly to readers.

Principles of disruptive innovation

Several factors make disruptive innovation possible. By understanding these factors, you have a better chance of identifying the soft underbelly of large companies and taking advantage of their susceptibilities: Continue reading… Continue reading… Continue reading…