Sustaining vs disruptive Innovation: Different strategies toward progress

As healthcare IT leaders are considering innovation strategies in the wake of the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) collapse, CHIME Innovation continues planning a forum for working through innovation challenges for its members: the Sustainable Innovation Summit (May 3-5, 2023) at Baptist Health Jacksonville. 

The Summit will explore how economically challenging times like these call for the “exploit” end of the innovation spectrum, as described by the Strategyzer organization. The “exploit” end of the spectrum mirrors the concerns of CHIME members about going back to basics and “doing more with less.”   

While innovation is essential for any business that wants to grow and stay ahead of the competition, not all innovation is created equal.  

Two main types of innovation: sustaining and disruptive 

Sustaining innovation 

• When a company improves its existing products or services to meet the needs and expectations of its current customers.  
• Aims to increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, and profitability by offering better quality, performance, or features.  
• Often incremental and evolutionary, rather than radical and revolutionary. 

Disruptive innovation  

• When a company creates a new product or service that disrupts an existing market or creates a new one.  
• Targets customers who are underserved, over-served, or ignored by the incumbent players.  
• Offers a simpler, cheaper, or more convenient alternative that appeals to these customers.  
• Often transformative and game-changing, rather than marginal and incremental. 

Both types of innovation have their advantages and disadvantages. Sustaining innovation can help a company maintain its competitive edge and market share in a stable and mature industry. However, sustaining innovation can also make a company complacent and blind to emerging threats and opportunities. Disruptive innovation can help a company capture new markets and customers in a dynamic and evolving industry. However, disruptive innovation can also be risky and costly, as it requires challenging the status quo and experimenting with unproven technologies and business models. 

So which type of innovation is best? The answer depends on your industry, your goals, your resources, and your capabilities. It also depends on the market environment and the economic climate. Ideally, organizations should pursue both types of innovation in a balanced way. Companies should use sustaining innovation to keep their existing customers happy and loyal, while also using disruptive innovation to explore new markets and customers that could be their future growth engines. 

To do this effectively, you need to have a clear vision of your value proposition, your target segments, your competitive landscape, and your core competencies. You also need to have a culture of curiosity, creativity, collaboration, and experimentation. And you need to have a process of generating, testing, validating, and scaling your ideas. The Strategyzer tools and methods offer a complete set of these solutions, and therefore are the primary models used in the CHIME Innovation workshops and live events. 

If you want to learn more about sustaining vs disruptive innovation strategies, check out these resources: 

• Sustaining vs. Disruptive Innovation: What’s the Difference? 
• Disruptive Innovation vs. Sustaining Innovation: a Time & Place for Both 
• Innovation vs disruption: Understanding the differences 

The CHIME Opioid Task Force (Linkedin, Twitter) was assembled in 2018 with a sole mission: to turn the tide on the opioid epidemic using the knowledge and expertise of the nation’s health care IT leaders. For more updates on the current state of the opioid crisis visit opioidactioncenter.com and listen to the Opioid Action Center podcast for the latest insights from HIT industry leaders.