Futures Report: Turning disruption into new value

Estimated read time: 3-4 minutes

Disruption is as much a part of business today as surprise software updates and conference call glitches. 

But while that conference call snafu can be solved quickly (“You’re on mute, Tom”), macro business disruption is much harder to manage. Get it right, and your business can endure and grow. Get it wrong, and your company may be gone.

Look no further than the Fortune 500: In the last 25 years, 52 percent of its listed companies have either fallen out of the rankings or simply no longer exist.¹

That disruption can be a force-multiplier for both rapid growth and rapid decline is a dynamic that most business leaders understand. In a recent KPMG survey² of senior executives, 76 percent expected disruption to affect their business within the year, and 84 percent believed that operationalizing innovation across the org could deliver significant competitive advantages.

The catch: Only 60 percent of those executives said their companies were fully prepared to manage disruption, and just 33 percent were highly confident they were making the right investments to ensure future competitiveness.

Clearly, managing disruption is table stakes for doing business today. But, as our survey suggests, there’s a gap between expectations and preparations. Closing that gap—“We know it’s coming, but we’re not quite ready”—is a huge opportunity, as we detail in our new 2024 Futures Report.

There’s no way to predict the future, of course. But closely monitoring potential disrupters and how they might affect your business is critical to staying on the right side of disruption’s double-edged sword. 

To frame this evaluation, we suggest tracking disruption trends across specific frontiers of opportunity. These are arenas that have the potential to create profound disruption—and deliver wide-open new opportunities to create value. Four frontiers that we are tracking:

Frontier #2: The AI age (big bang disruption)

Frontier # 3: Quantum computing (horizon disruption)

Frontier #4: The space economy (renaissance disruption)

As our new report details, executives who track the trends driving future disruption—and act now to take advantage—can position their organizations to create new value. To do that, business leaders need a framework for evaluation that can help them closely monitor the disrupters most likely to affect their companies.

Business planning will still benefit from lookbacks at where the business has been. But with rapid change now a business constant, leaders will need to closely monitor the signals from the frontiers of disruption to help them fully understand where their companies can go next. 

Download our 2024 Futures Report now for much more about the frontiers of disruption, what business leaders can do today to stay ahead, and a five-step plan for building a future-ready innovation strategy.

Footnotes:

¹ Ilan Mochari, “Why Half of the S&P 500 Companies Will Be Replaced in the Next Decade,” Inc. (March 23, 2016)

² KPMG LLP Executive Pulse Survey (2024).