It is surprising that many people still talk about technological disruption using the phrase “think big” as an example to generate added value to their products or services; they always tell us the same about it:

• Do it cheaper.
• Faster.
• Better quality.
• Build something that is more efficient.
• Your product should be more durable than others.

Certainly, their ideas can help us generate products and services that are better than those of the competition, but we continue to do the same as they do, we generate an added value with a model that could be copied by the competition.

Could the competition offer better prices or products made with better materials right now? Probably yes, but this happens since they follow a traditional model which they already know and for that reason, they can replicate.

And if the goal is to build something that cannot be copied, you have to take advantage of that knowledge that the competition does not offer, as that will show you obstacles that not everyone is willing to challenge.

There are only three steps that separate you from the success caused by technological disruption. It is not enough to say that we will do much more than our competition. But if we can say, “We will do it differently” and for this, we can follow three steps, which are:

#1 Break the Status Quo

The main reason why a company does not differentiate itself from its competition is thanks to the fact that the conventional is never questioned, and to end this paradigm, we can ask ourselves: Could I do this differently? Imagine a few years ago how people could have access to some kind of transportation in the city faster and even cheaper, maybe you can lower prices by sharing a car, but if a person with a private car could offer voluntarily to take other people would be much cooler, in fact, it can be said that this may have been the birth of the concept of “carpooling”.

#2 Simplify

It is simpler when we want to go buy books. Usually, we follow a series of concise steps: we shower, we change clothes, we go to the street, we take a taxi, we arrive at the bookstore, we look at the bookshelf, we pay and we return home again. Seems to be too many steps, right? This is usually called “friction points”.

To be able to break these points of friction, imagine how to improve the product we offer or how to reduce these steps, to do this we can think that the search from the user is less expensive, and this is simple since something done differently would have been later or more expensive.

#3 Listen

Only when we are empathic, can we understand the greater frustration of other people. How can you understand the tedious part of finding accommodation when we travel to another city if we usually stay at home with our family members? Listening to the opinions of our users turns out to be truly beneficial for a company when creating a new product and launching it on the market does not mean that we can understand the need (here is the importance of doing market validation).