Mark Surman just posted on the topic of “hybrid organizations,” which he defines as organizations characterized by a “mix of social mission, disruptive market strategies and web-like scale and collaboration.” However Mark doesn’t really explain what’s truly “disruptive” about the strategies of hybrid organizations, stating simply that such organizations “use products, services and consumer choice to promote the ideas and move the issues that they believe in.”
While Mark is using the phrase “disruptive strategy” somewhat vaguely, I think using it more precisely would have strengthened his argument. Disruptive strategies (or, alternately, “disruptive innovations”) in the sense used by Clayton Christensen and others involve providing goods or services at significantly lower cost to existing users and/or enabling new sets of uses or users for those good and services, and doing so in an economically sustainable way. Thus, for example, although a traditional nonprofit hospital may be a “social enterprise” by strict definition, in practice its business model and cost structure are typically similar to those of traditional for-profit hospitals. A traditional free clinic may provide a service at significantly lower cost to its patients, but its operations are not economically sustainable in the absence of subsidies; its strategy is thus not truly disruptive.
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