Business Briefing: we're overusing and underestimating 'disruption'

“Disruption” and “disrupters” have become buzz words in the business community and are often used to describe any change or evolution in a sector.

However businesses shouldn’t dismiss it as a fad says the University of Sydney’s Professor Kai Riemer, who has been studying disruption for the past five years.

Disruption is actually a fundamental change in the way we view and use products and what we understand and take for granted about an industry, not just an improvement brought about by a new product or player.

Take the businesses that have recently been dubbed disrupters as examples. Uber is changing the taxi industry, but it could just be a passing phenomenon in a greater shift towards a world where driverless cars are the norm and roads and carparking as we know it won’t exist.

Trying to predict this sort of disruption is almost impossible with what we know, says Professor Riemer, but businesses can have a stake in creating it.