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If you listened to our most recent podcast episode (see below), you heard JT White expounding upon why he hates the word “disrupt.” His visceral reaction got me thinking about why “disruption” is so hard to wrap our heads around. This week is a deep-dive into exactly what it means and why it tends to confuse.

Here’s what you’ll find:

"Disruption" gets misused because the word itself is misleading. To disrupt something usually means to break it, to cause trouble, or to force a change through conflict. That’s what the dictionary says. And that’s what most people imagine.

So when someone hears "disruptive innovation," they assume it means a startup crushed a market leader. Something (or someone) was broken, troubled, or changed.

But that’s not what the concept means in the context of business strategy. In a business setting, disruption isn’t a question of attacking incumbents; it's the process of revealing new value in markets that existing players have ignored or with users they thought didn’t matter.

Disruption happens when a business finds a way to serve people the rest of the industry wrote off.

This post was inspired by my recent interview with JT White for the new Innovate, Disrupt, or Die podcast. JT raised an interesting point when he said: “Canva didn’t disrupt Adobe. They just found 170 million people Adobe wasn’t talking to.”

And he's right. Canva didn’t replace Adobe.

But they DID break the assumptions on which the entire design software industry had been built:

These beliefs shaped the way the industry was built. They informed how companies designed products, priced access, and marketed capabilities. And, for years, nobody argued when an Adobe Suite license cost $600+.

But when Canva came in, they didn't abide by those assumptions.
They didn’t compete on those terms.
They redefined both.

Disruption doesn’t depend on challenging a specific competitor. Instead, it challenges the assumptions that define how the category operates. Specifically, disruption is about delivering value to people the incumbents don’t or won’t serve.

Disruption happens when a company enters at the low end of a market or in a completely new one. They bring something that is cheaper, simpler, and good enough. These solutions are often dismissed as unimportant or unprofitable by market leaders.

That’s exactly why they’re powerful.

Disruption rarely looks impressive at first. That’s kinda the point. It sneaks in by serving needs that existing companies ignore because doing so would cannibalize their margins or threaten their positioning.

Canva didn’t hurt Adobe’s core.
They served the 170 million people Adobe wasn’t built for.
And they built a massive business doing it.

The confusion stems from a simple problem: language.

“Disrupt” sounds aggressive. It sounds like defeat. So when people talk about disruption, they imagine one company toppling another.

But disruption doesn't mean destruction. It means serving a different segment in a different way. While that often leads to market dominance, it's not because of a head-on, David vs. Goliath battle.

This misunderstanding leads innovation teams down the wrong path. They chase category leaders instead of asking better questions about market structure, customer access, and hidden demand.

What Canva actually did was dismantle unspoken assumptions about who design software is for.

In doing so, they made the incumbent’s framing of the market obsolete.

Canva proved that there were millions of people who wanted to design but didn’t consider Adobe’s tools an option. Not because they weren’t aware of them. But because they were never invited in.

The assumptions Adobe and others built around were:

When Canva offered a tool that said, “No experience needed, start now, it’s free,” it didn’t just offer a product. It rewrote the rules. And it created an entirely new market category in the process.

Misunderstanding disruption doesn’t just lead to bad strategy. It leads to wasted ventures, dead-end investments, and teams solving problems that don’t matter.

For corporate venture teams, the lesson is this:

Disruption doesn’t come from beating competitors at their own game. It comes from uncovering value in places they never bothered to look. That means:

Too often, corporate innovation efforts focus on sustaining innovation. These are slight improvements that make the existing product better for the same customers. That’s safe. But it’s not disruption.

Disruption starts where your company isn’t looking. It demands the courage to serve a different user in a different way. Even when that user seems unprofitable, unserious, or outside your brand.

Disruption isn’t loud. It’s not obvious. It doesn’t announce itself with a pitch deck or a press release.

It starts small. It starts by serving people no one else sees.

Canva didn’t kill Adobe. They made Adobe’s map of the market obsolete.

That’s the playbook. That’s disruption.

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