Beyond Disruption - Rethinking Innovation Strategy in a Post-Crisis World
- Yetvart Artinyan
- 4 days ago
- 4 min read
Disruption used to be clear.
A new entrant appears, lowering market entry barriers — democratizing access. Cheaper. Simpler. Good enough. Then it gets better. Then it takes the market.
It’s the pattern so brilliantly captured by Clayton Christensen — and echoed by many others since: disruption starts small, where incumbents aren’t looking, and eventually redefines the game.
That playbook shaped how we built, defended, and measured business models for decades.
But something’s changed.
In 2025 — and certainly by 2035 — disruption doesn’t just hit product categories. It hits mental models, institutions, identities.
Markets aren’t just shifting. They’re fracturing. Customers aren’t just switching. They’re redefining value itself. And innovation isn’t about novelty anymore. It’s about relevance under pressure.
This essay explores the emerging patterns I see — not as a replacement for past frameworks, but as a next layer for those building the future.
From product advantage to paradigm shift
In earlier disruption theory, success was often about entering from below. Un(der)served outcomes for existing and new segments. Lower performance. Higher accessibility.
But today’s disruptors aren’t competing on price or performance.
They compete on paradigm and identity.
They question the whole premise:
Why do I need a job?
Why do I need an office?
Why do I need a degree, a boss, a bank, a roadmap, …?
The new disruptors don’t just steal market share. They rewire why the market exists in the first place.
By the time these shifts show up in your dashboards, you’re already behind.
Relevance is the new differentiator
The real competitive edge is no longer product innovation. It’s meaning clarity — and systemic fit.
If people don’t see how your solution helps them make real progress in a changing world, no growth hack will save you.
The central questions are shifting from:
“What do people want?” → “What feels like progress now?”
“What market are we in?” → “What future are we aligned with?”
The patterns I see point to a new set of strategic challenges — and capabilities we’ll need to build.
Before we go deeper, here's where the terrain begins to shift for most organizations:
1. Disruption doesn’t knock at the door. It recodes
Disruption today often looks less like a new entrant — and more like a cultural or behavioral pivot:
From owning to accessing
From competing to coordinating
From control to autonomy
From more to meaningful
The business model doesn't break because of performance gaps. It breaks because its logic no longer resonates.
2. Jobs to be done needs a broader lens
The original JTBD lens helped move us past product features and toward customer progress.
But in 2025 and beyond, we need to ask:
Whose progress are we enabling?
At what systemic cost?
For how long?
It’s not enough to understand individual needs. We must now see the entire context — ecological, social, and emotional — in which those needs arise.
If your solution helps one actor, but worsens the system they depend on, you're not solving. You're shifting the burden.
3. Growth isn’t the goal. It’s the signal.
We were trained to optimize for growth. But growth has become too ambiguous to be meaningful on its own.
Some growth is noise. Some growth is extraction. Some growth is just faster decay.
The more important questions now are:
What are we compounding?
What tensions are we ignoring?
Is our growth aligned with the real work people are trying to do?
4. How to detect early relevance decay
By the time your revenue dips, your relevance is already eroding. Here are four early signs to watch:
Language Mismatch – Customers talk about outcomes differently than your messaging does.
Emotional Disengagement – People use your product, but no longer feel aligned with it.
Silent Talent Flight – Smart people leave, not because of pay — but because they don’t believe in the direction.
Mission Leakage – Your org’s actions no longer reflect its stated values.
Relevance loss starts soft. But if ignored, it becomes existential.
5. Why systemic innovators will replace product thinkers
The next generation of innovators will not be defined by their ideas — but by their ability to work across boundaries.
They will:
Spot long-range tensions
Make sense of ambiguity
Connect user needs with societal shifts
Question institutional defaults
Redesign incentives, not just interfaces
This work is slower, deeper, and harder to quantify. But it’s how we stay relevant when the rules are dissolving.
6. Prompts for strategic relevance in 2025 and beyond
Use these questions with your team, board, or co-founders:
What feels true now, but may not survive the next 5 years?
What progress are we enabling — and for whom?
What problem are we no longer the best suited to solve?
What system failure are we accidentally contributing to?
What would “evolving in service of relevance” actually look like here?
Final thought on beyond disruption: Relevance is a discipline
This isn’t about abandoning everything we know.
It's about building on the shoulders of what’s useful — while staying honest about what no longer serves.
We don't need more innovation theatre that shifts resources from A to B and if it doesn’t bring the expected ROI shift back. We need innovation with consequence beyond disruption because there won’t be an A anymore, but a C, D, E, ….
That means learning to sense sooner, respond slower, and build systems that evolve — not just scale.
