Premise: the clean slate altar

In one year from now I will have worked in the innovation domain for 30 years. From product design & manufacturing to innovation consulting, to investing. I have seen the corporate birth chambers of new ideas up close and been part of hundreds of innovation projects. I’ve helped build and sell businesses, met and worked with the most creative marketers and engineers one could wish for. I can confirm it’s a great way to spend your life and career.

Yet in most ways my days look nothing like what I read in business books about how ‘innovation’ is supposed to work. The successes and heroics look different, as do the failures. I never read about the perpetual petty problems and most of the work is just that: work. Hard work, to agree and implement product upgrades in highly optimized environments where every tiny tweak makes colleagues angry. A world where customers refuse to buy your superior new solution for no clear reason.

In my view the main difference boils down to the innovation narrative always being about Disruption, while the reality almost never is. Disruption is heralded and celebrated, while it is usually that last thing the business problem calls for. Meanwhile, what makes progress happen remains elusive and misunderstood.

This book is my rallying cry against Change for Change’s sake, against Disruption as the only path to progress. I’ve compiled it from a number of articles and a huge number of scribbles I wrote in the past few years – alongside my other passion of writing business satire and poking fun at misbehaving companies and their teams.

Given I am a sucker for business wisdoms like Occam’s Razor or Murphy’s Law, Sunk Cost Fallacy, I wanted a similar snappy title along the lines of ‘The Disruption [X]’.

My options, in alphabetical order:

§  Bias: A tilt in thinking that skews decisions toward preconceptions, ignoring inconvenient facts like the setup of an organisation or the laws of physics.

§  Delusion: A stubborn belief in something that’s flat-out wrong, despite glaring evidence to the contrary. The entrepreneurial graveyard is full of them.

§  Dilemma: A no-win situation where every choice comes with a catch, forcing a tough trade-off. Aka ‘Life’.

§  Fallacy: A slick but naïve leap in reasoning that trips up everything that happens in its wake, ending badly.

§  Paradox: A head-scratching realisation, where what seems true flips into its opposite. This often defies intuition and is not what the HBR article promised.

Even though Disruption Delusion sounded nicer, I opted for Disruption Fallacy. It describes best what I have seen happen around me. It’s not about ignorance or bad intent, but naivety and wishful thinking.

As an engineer, I worked with a super talented team on a genuinely superior piece of equipment for hair colouring in salons. It bombed for reasons way beyond our reach that none of us had thought possible. As one of the founders of the global innovation agency Happen Group, we regularly came in after a failed ‘disruption’ to help get new propositions off the ground quickly that might not have seemed as sexy but definitely sold well. With new clients, we often found ourselves convincing innovation teams their growth ambitions were achievable without destroying half their supply chain along with their market share and reputation. Later on, as co-founder of the circular economy fund Una Terra, I was horrified to discover 97% of scale-ups[1] we met[2] were not market ready, or even market-relevant.

Disruption is over-valued.

In this book I’ll be looking mostly through the lens of mass market industries, because it’s a domain I know well.

Few people realize that the companies stocking your supermarkets and drug stores live in a very tough innovation reality. Low margin products that need to be made at consistent quality in immense volumes, with continuous renewal pressure from whining consumers, retailers, distributors and regulators. All while running on eye-wateringly expensive production equipment.

There is cause for hope, as I’ll explain. Let’s dive in and rebel against rebelling.

Costas Papaikonomou

The Hague, April 2025

[1] Term used for a recently founded & funded small business aiming to grow fast now that its technology has been proven viable and the market potential defined.

[2] Fewer than 5 out of 150 we spoke with in one year had any medium-term viability baked in. We then put stronger filters in and spoke only with better candidates.