Paul Paetz

Paul Paetz is a startup advisor, entrepreneur, and an adjunct professor who teaches applied disruption theory to undergraduate and graduate business students. He is the founder of Innovative Disruption, Inc., a boutique consultancy that provides services to startups, innovation teams, and companies whose industries are facing disruption. Prior to starting Innovative Disruption, he accumulated over 25 years of experience working with technology companies in a variety of executive capacities including product management, sales, marketing, and P&L, and then as a marketing consultant, and finally as a disruptive innovation consultant with The Disruption Group before forming his own company.

As the leading expert and practitioner of intentional disruption, Paul's book "Disruption by Design" is packed with practical and immediately useful insights that entrepreneurs, startups founders, product managers, investors, and students of disruption can use to create disruptive innovations on purpose. His book was acknowledged as one of the top technology business books of 2014 by the Consumer Electronics Association and featured as part of Gary's Book Club at CES 2015, and was also the subject of a presentation at SXSW in 2015.

Paul is the creator of the Disruption Report Card™ and of the Disruption By Design Business Model Canvas™ (a free interactive tool for designing disruptive business models).

Why does Paul possess such a passion for disruptive innovation?

As Paul was building his resume in the technology industry, many of the companies he was exposed to and learned from -- whether they were employers, clients, partners or competitors -- had the potential to be disruptive innovators. Yet despite most having unique and powerful technologies, it seemed a completely random hit-or-miss proposition which companies broke through as big market successes. Companies with great products often failed to go anywhere, while others with decidedly inferior products often emerged as the winners. There was no obvious explanation -- even the expected fall-backs of great management, highly creative marketing, incredible salespeople or being first to market didn't hold up -- and "luck of the draw" wasn't a very satisfying answer.

Conventional wisdom held that the best products should win ("build a better mousetrap . . ."), but in truth, conventional analysis and predictions were no better than throwing darts at the wall. It wasn't obvious what the answer to this conundrum was, but it did serve as a good starting point for discussions over beer.

Around the turn of the millennium, Paul read Clayton Christensen's "The Innovator’s Dilemma" and immediately recognized its explanatory power for which innovations won and lost and why. Later in 2003, an old friend was starting up a consultancy he called The Disruption Group. He had built a successful career as a research director for UBS using disruption theory to predict winners ahead of the market. (He was the first analyst to issue a BUY call on RIM based on his reading of the Blackberry as a powerful disruptor -- a prediction that came true and made RIM into a market leader until the iPhone started the disruption cycle over again.) He invited Paul to join him in this new venture, which eventually led to the formation of Innovative Disruption when his friend decided to return to the securities investment business.

In 2007, Paul used disruption theory to predict the iPhone's success, and how it would disrupt the market and kill Blackberry, going against the opinions of his former partner as well as Christensen who both said it wasn't disruptive. In retrospect his analysis from that time is remarkably prescient. In it he predicts Apple's sales and growth curves with remarkable accuracy, how it would topple Nokia and RIM and how long it would likely take, the birth of the not-yet-created App Store, and why the iPhone would go on to be one of the most important technology creations of our time.

The secret, which is true of all big disruptive innovations and one of the hardest things to recognize, is that whether a product will disrupt or not is dependent on uniquely satisfying a critical "job to be done" that consumers choose it for, and therefore what market you compare it to. It's a big challenge for most, because we simply lack a frame of reference for markets that don't exist yet.

Paul's research suggests that all real economic growth is derived from disruptive innovation, which makes it critically important as a tool for reinvigorating our economy, retiring our seemingly insurmountable national debt, and the creation of good, high-paying jobs. And, despite what appears to most to be a period of rapid and accelerating innovation, the rate of startup formation is 25% lower than just a decade ago, and relative to number of people who are in the prime business forming years of their lives, it is less than 1/2 what it was in the late 1970s. Compared with the huge advances of the 20th century, we are moving at a snail's pace. But, solving the really big problems from cleaning up the environment, using energy more responsibly, acidification and rising ocean levels, getting the costs of healthcare and education under control, feeding and housing the growing global middle classes, reducing poverty, and facing down the impending crisis of antibiotic ineffectiveness against drug-resistant superbugs to name just a few, we are going to require disruptive innovations in virtually every sector of society just to survive this century.

Many recognize that the word 'disruption' in the context of innovation has become grossly overused and misused -- clearly, most innovation is not disruptive, and that will always be the case. However, no amount of misuse of the term as a buzzword can diminish how important disruptive innovations are to the economy and to the advancement of society and social welfare.