Disruptive Innovation Course

Did you know that even innovation icons like Kodak and Nokia pioneered key technologies yet still declined because they clung to legacy profit engines, downplayed internal innovators, and underestimated the power of new business models and ecosystems?

Course Overview

The Disruptive Innovation Course by Rcademy is designed to equip senior executives, C-suite leaders, board members, business unit heads, divisional leaders, general managers, strategy officers, innovation leaders, R&D directors, management consultants, advisors, entrepreneurs, startup founders, industry analysts, investors, and management professionals with comprehensive understanding of disruptive innovation theory, characteristics of disruptive technologies versus sustaining innovations, and strategic frameworks for identifying and responding to disruptive threats in competitive landscapes. Participants gain expert knowledge of business model innovation, open innovation and ecosystem partnerships, organizational ambidexterity for managing incumbent inertia, and leadership capabilities that embrace experimentation, learning from failure, and agile adaptation to disruption.​

Without specialized disruptive innovation training, professionals may struggle to diagnose disruption-related risks in incumbents, distinguish between low-end and new-market disruption patterns, design separate organizational units that avoid cannibalization conflicts, build cultures that encourage dissent and listen to internal innovators, or stress-test current strategies against comparable risks like those that destroyed Nokia and Kodak, limiting their ability to lead strategic transformation and navigate disruptive transitions. This comprehensive course provides a structured path to mastery across disruptive innovation theory foundations, disruptive versus sustaining innovation characteristics, industry disruption assessment, business model innovation, ecosystem and open innovation strategies, strategic responses including ambidextrous organizations, culture building for disruptive innovation, innovation processes and methodologies, financial modeling for disruptive investments, digital disruption and technology trends, industry-specific case studies, and scenario planning for disruptive futures, preparing attendees to lead organizational transformation and competitive repositioning initiatives.​

The Disruptive Innovation Course covers foundations of disruptive innovation theory, disruptive versus sustaining innovation characteristics, industry analysis and disruption assessment, business model innovation including platform and subscription models, ecosystem and open innovation strategies, strategic responses to disruption including ambidextrous organizations, building a culture of disruptive innovation, innovation processes including design thinking and MVP development, financial modeling and investment decisions for disruptive projects, digital disruption and emerging technology trends, industry-specific case studies across financial services, retail, healthcare, manufacturing, transportation, and energy, scenarios and future orientation with strategic foresight, and practical workshops for assessing organizational vulnerability and designing disruptive innovation initiatives. Participants learn to identify low-end disruption attacking from below with cost advantages, recognize new-market disruption creating entirely new customer segments, apply business model canvas for testing new models at low cost, design ambidextrous organizations balancing exploitation of existing business with exploration of new opportunities, manage cannibalization and stakeholder alignment during transitions, and use scenario planning for disruptive futures.​

Real-world cases show how Kodak played a pioneering role in imaging technology and even developed an early digital camera, yet chose to prioritize film and photo paper profits, treating digital as a threat rather than the future of its business, with failure to shift its core business model and reallocate resources leading to collapse of its traditional markets and precipitous decline.

Studies also show that Nokia’s dominance in mobile telecommunications was undermined by its slow and fragmented response to the rise of smartphones and software-centric ecosystems, with the company continuing to emphasize hardware and incremental improvements to its existing Symbian platform while rivals built integrated hardware-software-app ecosystems that better matched evolving consumer expectations.

Take charge of your innovation strategy. Enroll now in the Rcademy Disruptive Innovation Course to master the strategic frameworks that help organizations navigate disruptive change.

Who Should Attend?

The Disruptive Innovation Course by Rcademy is ideal for:

• Senior executives, C-suite leaders, and board members
• Business unit heads and divisional leaders
• General managers managing product/service portfolios
• Strategy officers and innovation leaders
• R&D directors driving organizational innovation
• Management consultants and advisors
• Entrepreneurs and startup founders
• Industry analysts and investors
• Corporate development and M&A professionals
• Product managers and innovation champions
• Digital transformation leaders
• Business model innovation specialists
• Anyone seeking comprehensive disruptive innovation certification

What are the Training Goals?

The main objectives of the Disruptive Innovation Course are to enable professionals to:

• Master the theory and principles of disruptive innovation, understanding how disruptive technologies and business models challenge incumbent firms and reshape industries.
• Analyze the characteristics of disruptive innovations: lower cost, simpler, more convenient, versus sustaining innovations that improve existing products for core customers.
• Develop strategic frameworks for identifying, assessing, and responding to disruptive threats in your industry and competitive landscape.
• Design and implement disruptive innovation strategies: building separate organizations, managing incumbent inertia, and enabling organizational transformation.
• Evaluate business model innovation, open innovation, and ecosystem partnerships as drivers of disruption and competitive advantage.
• Apply case analysis and strategic scenario planning to prepare organizations for disruptive change and emerging market opportunities.
• Develop leadership capabilities and organizational culture that embraces experimentation, learning from failure, and agile adaptation to disruption.

How Will This Training Course Be Presented?

At Rcademy, the extensive focus is laid on the relevance of the training content to the audience. Thus, content is reviewed and customised as per the professional backgrounds of the audience.

The training framework includes:

• Expert-led lectures by senior innovation and strategy professionals using audio-visual sessions
• Hands-on exercises with disruption assessment and business model canvas development
• Interactive workshops for identifying disruptive innovations and emerging competitors
• Case studies covering Kodak digital photography failure, Nokia smartphone ecosystem missteps, Blockbuster streaming disruption, and successful disruptors across industries
• Practical simulations for designing disruptive innovation initiatives and strategic scenario planning

The theoretical part of training is delivered by an experienced professional from the relevant domain, using audio-visual presentations. This innovation-focused approach ensures professionals translate theory into practical workflows through industry vulnerability assessment, disruptive threat identification, business model innovation design, and organizational transformation planning.​

This comprehensive certification model ensures participants gain both disruptive innovation fundamentals and hands-on proficiency to immediately apply strategic frameworks in executive leadership, innovation management, corporate strategy, and entrepreneurial ventures.​

Register now to experience a rigorous, hands-on learning journey designed to equip you for leading organizational transformation, innovation strategy, and competitive repositioning initiatives.

Course Syllabus

Module 1: Foundations of Disruptive Innovation Theory

• Defining disruption: disruptive vs. sustaining innovation and the innovation dilemma.​
• Historical examples of disruptive innovations: digital photography, e-commerce, smartphones, streaming media.​
• Characteristics of disruptive technology: lower cost, simpler, more convenient, emerging in new markets.​
• S-curve dynamics: technology performance, market maturity, and inflection points.​
• Why incumbents struggle with disruption: organizational inertia, profit model constraints, and cognitive biases.​

Module 2: Disruptive vs. Sustaining Innovation

• Sustaining innovation: improving products for existing customers, maintaining profit margins.​
• Performance oversupply and the transition from underperforming to overperforming products.​
• Low-end disruption: attacking from below with cost advantages and acceptable quality.​
• New-market disruption: creating entirely new customer segments and consumption patterns.​
• Combination disruptions and convergence effects across industries.​

Module 3: Industry Analysis and Disruption Assessment

• Analyzing industry structure, value chains, and competitive dynamics.​
• Identifying vulnerability to disruption: examining profit models, customer priorities, and market segments.​
• Competitive positioning analysis using Porter’s Five Forces and strategic group mapping.​
• Assessing emerging technologies and early signals of market disruption.​
• Building disruption radar and early warning systems for competitive monitoring.​

Module 4: Business Model Innovation

• Fundamentals of business model design: value proposition, customer segments, revenue streams, cost structure.​
• Disruptive business models: platform models, subscription models, freemium, sharing economy.​
• Value chain reconfiguration and new go-to-market approaches.​
• Unbundling and rebundling of services and capabilities across the value chain.​
• Business model canvas and iteration for testing new models at low cost.​

Module 5: Ecosystem and Open Innovation Strategies

• Ecosystems and platform economics in driving disruption.​
• Network effects and winner-take-most dynamics in technology markets.​
• Open innovation: crowdsourcing, partnerships, acquisition of startups, and innovation intermediaries.​
• Strategic partnerships and alliances for accessing complementary capabilities and markets.​
• Co-innovation and co-creation models with customers and suppliers.​

Module 6: Strategic Responses to Disruption

• Organizational approaches: spinning off separate business units, acquiring disruptors, or licensing technology.​
• Ambidextrous organizations: balancing exploitation of existing business with exploration of new opportunities.​
• Portfolio management: sustaining innovation, adjacent innovation, and transformational innovation allocation.​
• Timing and scale-up: when and how to shift resources from traditional to disruptive offerings.​
• Cannibalization management and stakeholder alignment during transitions.​

Module 7: Building a Culture of Disruptive Innovation

• Leadership behaviors and mindsets that embrace experimentation and tolerate failure.​
• Psychological safety, innovation incentives, and reward systems for breakthrough thinking.​
• Cross-functional collaboration and breaking down organizational silos.​
• Talent acquisition and development for innovation: hiring for creativity, learning agility, and risk-taking.​
• Managing resistance and organizational change during disruptive transitions.​

Module 8: Innovation Processes and Methodologies

• Stage-gate processes vs. agile and lean innovation approaches.​
• Design thinking and rapid prototyping for validating disruptive ideas.​
• Minimum viable product (MVP) and iterative development for market testing.​
• Customer discovery and value proposition testing methodologies.​
• Metrics for innovation: success rates, time to market, profitability, and market share impact.​

Module 9: Financial Modeling and Investment Decisions

• Valuing disruptive innovations: traditional DCF limitations and new valuation approaches.​
• Real options analysis for managing uncertainty in disruptive technology investments.​
• Portfolio approach to innovation investment: balancing risk and return.​
• Venture capital and private equity models for identifying and funding disruptive startups.​
• ROI measurement and success metrics for disruptive innovation projects.​

Module 10: Digital Disruption and Technology Trends

• Digital transformation and its disruptive impact across industries.​
• Emerging technologies: artificial intelligence, blockchain, IoT, 5G, quantum computing.​
• Platform disruption: how digital platforms reshape traditional value chains.​
• Data as a disruptive asset and competitive moat.​
• Cybersecurity and privacy implications of disruptive technologies.​

Module 11: Industry-Specific Case Studies

• Financial services disruption: fintech, digital banking, blockchain, and cryptocurrency.​
• Retail disruption: e-commerce, omnichannel, AI-driven personalization, autonomous checkout.​
• Healthcare disruption: telemedicine, digital health, AI diagnostics, and precision medicine.​
• Manufacturing disruption: 3D printing, Industry 4.0, automation, and distributed production.​
• Transportation and mobility disruption: ride-sharing, autonomous vehicles, electric vehicles, shared mobility.​
• Energy disruption: renewable energy, battery storage, distributed generation, smart grids.​

Module 12: Scenarios and Future Orientation

• Scenario planning for disruptive futures: optimistic, pessimistic, and most likely scenarios.​
• Megatrends analysis: demographic, technological, economic, environmental, social shifts.​
• Implications of disruption on organizational strategy: portfolio adjustment, M&A, partnerships.​
• Strategic foresight and horizon scanning techniques.​
• Building organizational agility and adaptability for future uncertainty.​

Module 13: Practical Workshops and Strategic Planning

• Workshop: assessing your organization’s vulnerability to disruption in your industry.​
• Workshop: identifying potential disruptive innovations and emerging competitors.​
• Strategic planning exercise: designing disruptive innovation initiatives for your organization.​
• Business model innovation workshop: testing alternative revenue streams and value propositions.​
• Case study analysis: examining real-world successes and failures in managing disruption.

Training Impact

The impact of Disruptive Innovation training is visible in how organizations learn to avoid the fate of incumbents like Kodak and Nokia, recognize how strategic inertia and path dependence destroy value, and use high-profile failures to stress-test current strategies.​

Kodak – From Digital Imaging Pioneer to Case Study in Self-Disruption Failure

Implementation: Kodak played a pioneering role in imaging technology and even developed an early digital camera in 1975 invented by engineer Steve Sasson, yet chose to prioritize film and photo paper profits, treating digital as a threat rather than the future of its business. The company’s stubborn refusal to support the development that rivalled its core product, film, became a cautionary tale to any major corporation and a sign to innovative start-ups that even the most monolithic corporations can become vulnerable. Addicted to the profits generated by its 35mm film, Kodak would do nothing that it saw as endangering the success of this business, with a lack of early investment in digital photography during the 1970s bringing a double-whammy during the 1990s as the giant corporation was not only laid low by smaller firms like Sony and Canon but the entire film photography industry created by the company was finally relegated to second-class status behind digital by the 2000s. Drawing on strategic management and organizational behavior principles, research explores Kodak’s cultural inertia, missed opportunities to lead in digital innovation, and strategic focus on short-term film profits over long-term transformation.​

Results: The main causes of Kodak’s failure were fear of self-disruption (avoiding aggressive digital photography development because it threatened profitable film business), failure to commercialize innovation (inventing the first digital camera but not turning it into competitive business), attachment to an outdated business model (profits deeply tied to film and chemical processing), strong organizational inertia (culture, structure, and incentives resisted disruptive ideas), and delayed response to digitalization (underestimating the speed and impact while failing to reallocate resources in time). Over time, as digital cameras and then smartphone cameras became ubiquitous, Kodak’s failure to shift its core business model and reallocate resources led to a collapse of its traditional markets and a precipitous decline in its competitive position. Many digital cameras were sold at a loss, the film business where Kodak enjoyed high profit margins continued to fall, and by 2007, Kodak had dropped to No. 4 in U.S. digital camera sales with 9.6% share, falling to 7% share in seventh place by 2010 behind Canon, Sony, Nikon, and others. The company exited the film camera market altogether, closing 13 film plants and 130 photo finishing facilities and laying off 50,000 employees between 2004 and 2007, ultimately filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in January 2012. The case illustrates how fear of cannibalization and attachment to legacy revenue streams can prevent incumbents from exploiting disruptive innovations they themselves helped create.

Nokia – Strategic Missteps in the Transition to Smartphones

Implementation: According to the study, Nokia’s dominance in mobile telecommunications was undermined by its slow and fragmented response to the rise of smartphones and software-centric ecosystems. The company continued to emphasize hardware and incremental improvements to its existing Symbian platform while rivals built integrated hardware-software-app ecosystems that better matched evolving consumer expectations. Nokia’s failure stemmed from strategic misalignment (failure to adapt to market shifts from feature phones to smartphones), organizational inertia (internal resistance to change hindering ability to innovate), late ecosystem entry (delayed partnership with Microsoft contrasting with Apple and Google’s strong ecosystems), slow decision-making (large and complex organizational structure leading to delayed and compromise-driven decisions), and internal culture problems (middle managers discouraged from sharing negative information so top management did not receive early warning signals). While rivals like Apple and Samsung focused on integrating cutting-edge software and user experiences, Nokia remained entrenched in its hardware-centric approach, with this strategic myopia preventing it from innovating and responding effectively to the rapid changes in the mobile industry.​

Results: Strategic misalignment, leadership turnover, and delayed ecosystem moves contributed to a sharp loss in market share and the eventual sale of Nokia’s mobile division making it a cautionary example of how even highly innovative firms can fail to manage disruptive transitions. In the case of Nokia, disruption was no real surprise because they saw it (Apple and Android) and were countering it (with Symbian open source), but nobody could foresee the rapid evolution of platform economics, nor the skills needed to make platforms work. This as much as the absence of a good smartphone to compete with the iPhone sank Nokia in fact with its QT interface it could well have produced phones to compete with the iPhone, but what it did not have was the Apps Store platform, a factor critics continue to ignore when assessing Apple’s durability and strength. The study emphasizes that cultural rigidity and leadership mindsets not just technology gaps were central to Nokia’s decline, with the company underestimating the strategic importance of software and app compatibility. Leaders who absorb these lessons are more likely to build cultures that encourage dissent, listen to internal innovators, and treat disruptive technologies as opportunities rather than threats.​

Blockbuster – Missing the Transition from Physical Rental to Digital Distribution

Implementation: Within its broader discussion of corporate failures, research also references Blockbuster as another organization that failed to adapt its business model in time, missing the transition from physical rental to digital distribution. At its core, Blockbuster failed to recognize the disruptive power of Netflix’s model, stemming from a combination of arrogance, inertia, and a flawed understanding of innovation. Blockbuster’s revenue was largely fueled by infamously unpopular late fees (estimated at $800 million in 2000), an issue Netflix sidestepped entirely with its subscription model, no late fees, and customer-focused approach. Netflix’s business model took Blockbuster’s weaknesses and exploited them Blockbuster’s many store locations, once an asset, became too numerous for quality control, leading to an unreliable user experience, while Netflix was fully online, offered a user-friendly interface, and could be accessed from a customer’s couch. Blockbuster ended late fees in 2005 too late and at a $200M cost, with its hybrid service Total Access initially outperforming Netflix but financially unsustainable, while internal boardroom politics (e.g. Carl Icahn ousting CEO John Antioco) led to inconsistent strategy contrasting with Netflix’s clear leadership and commitment to digital growth.​

Results: Blockbuster was unable to pivot to digital formats and clung to its DVD rental model, which was rapidly becoming obsolete, with the company declaring bankruptcy by 2010, burdened by debt and dwindling revenue, while Netflix continued to thrive, expanding its library and producing original content. Blockbuster had the data but not the transformation mindset consumer interest in online services was rising, broadband adoption was growing, and competitors were testing digital-first models, yet its deeply entrenched workflows and brick-and-mortar investments made experimentation slow, costly, and politically difficult. Netflix proved to be a very disruptive innovation, because Blockbuster would have to alter its business model and damage its profitability in order to compete with the startup. While the paper’s core comparative analysis focuses on Nokia and Kodak, Blockbuster is cited to reinforce the general pattern: industry leaders that underestimate disruptive business models, cling to outdated revenue logic, and react too slowly to shifting consumer behavior risk rapid and sometimes irreversible decline.​

Be inspired by how market leaders like Nokia, Kodak, and Blockbuster lost ground by missing disruptive shifts. Join the Rcademy Disruptive Innovation Course to gain the strategic frameworks needed to anticipate change and stay competitive.