User:Mosesacquah

Disruptive innovironment is a term that describes the stimulating socio-economic factor in the environment that drives a need for disruptive innovations, which develop products and services that take root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly move up the market, eventually displacing established key products that were historically expensive, complicated and inaccessible and replacing them with products that are accessible, often affordable, uncomplicated and available to a much larger population. This transformation is normally made possible through the utilization of appropriate technologies, knowledge collaboration and technology transfer and it generates a culture for creativity and entrepreneurial innovation activities. Innovironment simply means the the environment in which an innovation occurs.

Many cities around the world have been identified as having a conducive innovironment, i.e. as being places that foster initiatives and innovation. Some of them are now popularly known as incubators and innovation hubs, such as for instance the Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area, which have long been the world leaders in high-tech start-ups, bringing forth cutting-edge companies such as Apple, Intel, Google, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Twitter. Disruptive innovations seem to go unnoticed until they gain massive traction from the market, and therefore many potentially innovative environments may not be considered as valuable by businesses for the time being. It is easy to see the comfortable, affluent Silicon Valley area as a prime example for an environment conducive to innovation, while it may be much harder to see a city in a developing country as equally conducive.

Emerging markets are often characterized by pervasive scarcity on many fronts, an underdeveloped infrastructure, ineffective governments and a lack of access to basic services. Technology, globalisation and interconnectivity amplifies the sense of exclusion that prevails in many of these environments, but at the same time offers interesting ways to reduce it. Consumers in these markets are very value conscious, as they often have limited financial resources, but many have recently shifted from being non-consumers to being consumers due to the introduction of disruptive innovations. Analysts have ranked the world top start-up cities based on their own key performance indexes, but they tend to leave out environments that could be described as negative, unfavourable and harsh, but nevertheless also trigger a lot of innovation, especially disruptive innovation. To describe these often forgotten, somewhat different conducive environments, the term “disruptive innovironment” is very fitting.

Africa has proven to be a very disruptive innovironment with vivid evidence of innovation in several business sectors such as the financial sector - mobile banking. in the field of technology and telecommunications, there has been a rapid move from the difficulty of acquiring a simple mobile number, to today’s ease of getting 2 to 3 sim cards, and there is a growing number of accessible and affordable devices as compared to the past. The global business community is observing and have began to adopt specific strategies to enable them to strive in the era of disruptive innovironments springing up in many emerging markets around the globe.