The Hidden Threat: Why Your Best Practices Are Killing Innovation

Many successful businesses believe they’re making the right moves—listening to customers, optimizing existing products, and focusing on profitability. Yet, despite doing everything “right,” they may find themselves blindsided by smaller, more agile competitors. 

This is the paradox at the heart of Clayton Christiansen’s book The Innovator’s Dilemma: The very things that made your business successful are the same things that could lead to its downfall. 

Why Success Creates Blind Spots 

Big, established businesses tend to focus on: 
✅ Serving their best customers (their largest accounts, most loyal or most promising customers)  
✅ Maximizing efficiency (this might be focusing on efficient production, improving the customer experience or improving internal systems and processes) 
✅ Investing in incremental improvements (usually driven by a need to maintain market share or satisfy customer needs) 

But while they perfect their existing offerings, disruptive innovation is happening at the edges—in places that seem too small or niche to matter so the established businesses ignore the innovation, or worse yet, don’t even know it’s happening. 

Startups and new entrants don’t tend to compete head-on.  Instead, they create new markets, lower-cost alternatives, or completely different ways of solving problems. By the time large companies notice, it’s too late. 

The Cost of Ignoring Disruptive Innovation 
Think about companies like Blockbuster, Nokia, or Kodak. These famous companies didn’t fail because they lacked resources. They failed because they were too focused on their current success to see the future unfolding. 

🚨 Blockbuster dominated video rentals—until Netflix changed the game. 
🚨 Kodak invented digital photography—then ignored it to protect film sales. 
🚨 Nokia was the market leader in mobile phones—until Apple and Android redefined the industry. 

How to Break Free from the Innovator’s Dilemma 
The solution isn’t to abandon what works, but to create space for innovation that challenges your current business model.   

You see, the biggest risk isn’t failure—it’s complacency. If your business is focused only on what’s working today, you will become myopic and miss what will drive success tomorrow. 

At Leading Culture, one of the ways we help businesses break free from the trap of incremental thinking with our 5-day Innovation Sprint. This process: 
🚀 Identifies emerging opportunities before competitors do. 
🎯 Develops disruptive ideas—without disrupting core operations. 
⚡ Compresses months of work into a focused, high-impact week. 

👉 Book a call to see how our Innovation Sprint helps businesses stay ahead.