Disruptive innovation

Both agencies and clients are facing rapid change in the current business environment, so it makes little sense for them to continue along the same road for innovation, which has traditionally been through 'sustaining' innovation - taking small, incremental steps, usually in the area of communication.

Disruptive innovation

Will NichollsDare

Agencies assist client innovation through small, incremental improvements, mainly in communications. The time has come to move from 'sustaining' to 'disruptive' innovation.

Creative agencies have always been good at innovation. However, the need for predictable growth has meant that creative agencies have been sucked into focusing almost exclusively on the type of innovation that our clients think they need – that is, small, incremental improvements to what we did yesterday; a slightly more original TV ad, a responsive website design, and so on. We have become experts at Clayton Christensen's 'sustaining' innovation.

This focus has...

Not a subscriber?

Schedule your live demo with our team today

WARC helps you to plan, create and deliver more effective marketing

  • Prove your case and back-up your idea

  • Get expert guidance on strategic challenges

  • Tackle current and emerging marketing themes

We’re long-term subscribers to WARC and it’s a tool we use extensively. We use it to source case studies and best practice for the purposes of internal training, as well as for putting persuasive cases to clients. In compiling a recent case for long-term, sustained investment in brand, we were able to support key marketing principles with numerous case studies sourced from WARC. It helped bring what could have been a relatively dry deck to life with recognisable brand successes from across a broad number of categories. It’s incredibly efficient to have such a wealth of insight in one place.

Insights Team
Bray Leino

You’re in good company

We work with 80% of Forbes' most valuable brands* and 80% of the world's top top-of-the-class agencies.

* Top 10 brands