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In this podcast, Adam Hartung, managing partner of Spark Partners, discusses an innovation business model based on disrupting the status quo that gave way to an organization's foundational success.

If you want to succeed, you have to grow. If you want to grow, you have to disrupt. That is the advice of Adam Hartung, managing partner of Sparks Partners and author of, Create Marketplace Disruption: How to Stay Ahead of the Competition. Hartung adds that you have to make it a basic fact of your organization that disruption is acceptable and possibly even desirable. He says, "Look at the kind of markets Virgin gets into. Sir Richard Branson and his team encourage disruptive ideas. What could be more disruptive than Virgin Galactic, selling seats on space flights? That's how Virgin has produced superior returns for investors, employees and suppliers."

Hartung's Sparks Partners goes beyond helping companies nurture innovative ideas and bringing them to market. Instead, Spark Partners prevents companies from short-circuiting innovation because they lock themselves in to the success formulas that have brought them to where they are. The company's three-step innovation process includes the following:

• Analyzing the external challenges that will disrupt an organization's marketplace.
• Opening the lock that keeps an organization's best ideas from being implemented.
• Converting ideas into success by creating white space within the organization where the ideas are safe and not hampered by established ways of doing things.

Hartung has much first-hand experience helping companies to take advantage of emerging technologies and new business models. He began his career as an entrepreneur, selling the first general-purpose computing platform to use the 8080 microprocessor when he was an undergraduate. At DuPont, Adam built a new division from nothing to over $600 million revenue in less than three years, opening subsidiaries on every populated continent and implementing new product development across both Europe and Asia. At Pepsi, Adam led the initiative to start Pizza Hut Home Delivery. He opened over 200 stores in less than two years. He also led the global expansion mergers and acquisition initiative acquiring several hundred additional sites. He played a lead role in the Kentucky Fried Chicken acquisition.

Adam Hartung is managing partner of Sparks Partners and author of Create Marketplace Disruption: How to Stay Ahead of the Competition. He previously spent eight years as a partner in the consulting arm of Computer Sciences Corporation. He also held strategy positions at The Boston Consulting Group, PepsiCo, and DuPont. He received an MBA from Harvard Business School with Distinction.

Resources

To Succeed You Must Disrupt, Forbes
http://www.forbes.com/2010/03/01/disrupt-change-innovation-leadership-managing-hartung.html

Listen to Competitors, Not Customers, Forbes
http://www.forbes.com/2010/01/06/innovation-customers-competitors-leadership-managing-marketing.html

A Key to a Successful Business Plan, Forbes
http://www.forbes.com/2009/12/07/scenario-planning-strategy-leadership-managing-plan.html

Production Credits

Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer

Audio Editing by Doug Marcis