Hello Innovator!

In last week’s edition, we posited the question: Can you design a path to disruption? We outlined five patterns that you can foster internally to help drive disruption.

This week, we’re taking that line of thinking a step further, and we’re excited to share the latest innovation in innovation: The Disruption Canvas. It’s a tool for enabling deliberate disruption as a starting point when you’re pursuing new ideas. Read on to learn about this new tool for determining the disruptive potential of your latest idea.

Here’s what you’ll find:

• This Week’s Article: The Disruption Canvas

Introducing the Disruption Canvas

A tool for identifying the disruptive potential of your ideas before you waste time building the wrong thing.

What is disruption?

Disruption is not invention. It’s not novelty. It’s not better technology.

Disruption is what happens when someone challenges the unspoken assumptions that underpin a market, and then delivers a simpler, cheaper, more accessible alternative that works. Not just for the core user, but for those who’ve been priced out, ignored, or forced to find workarounds.

Disruption often starts small. On the fringe. With a product that looks inferior to incumbents... until it quietly redefines the market on your terms.

As we’ve written before, disruption begins with subtraction. It strips away complexity. It changes how value is delivered and who it’s delivered to. It unlocks access. It exposes the brittleness of dominant players who’ve forgotten what real users need.

Why pursue disruption?

When pursued deliberately, disruption changes the game. It creates strategic advantage that’s hard to copy because it changes what customers expect and how companies compete.

Disruption requires a fundamentally different strategy, one that doesn’t follow the logic of incumbents or optimize within existing norms. It creates advantage by:

• Serving markets your competitors don’t see or can’t reach

• Competing on simplicity, accessibility, or cost rather than feature parity

• Reaching non-consumers who’ve been excluded

• Leveraging advantages incumbents can’t mimic without threatening their core

• Shifting what customers value, expect, and eventually demand

Novelty alone doesn’t create disruption. What matters is whether the idea challenges the assumptions that sustain the status quo and forces a shift in how markets operate. That’s why companies that pursue disruption intentionally, and design for it from the beginning, build momentum others can’t easily replicate.

Examples of Deliberate Disruption

Kodak vs. Fujifilm

When film began its decline, Kodak clung to its legacy business, hoping digital would remain niche. Fujifilm, facing the same threat, reframed its capabilities, particularly its expertise in chemical coatings, and expanded into healthcare, cosmetics, and imaging technologies. In this case, disruption had nothing to do with digital cameras. It came from leveraging new value networks before the old one collapsed.

Toyota vs. GM

While GM iterated on the same vehicle formats and cost structures, Toyota adopted lean manufacturing and compact models tailored to a different segment that GM ignored. Toyota didn't try to out-GM GM. They changed the expectations of quality, affordability, and reliability. That reframing allowed Toyota to take share from the bottom up and redefine market assumptions.

Canva vs. Adobe

Adobe built powerful tools for professionals. Canva wasn’t built for professionals. It was built for everyone else — people who needed to make something quickly, easily, and online. Canva’s model wasn’t a cheaper Photoshop. It was a rejection of the assumption that design had to be complex at all.

From the Disruption Test to the Disruption Canvas

At Apollo 21, we’ve worked on many new venture concepts inside companies of all sizes. We’ve helped shape ideas that launched, created real value, and in some cases even redefined how those companies thought about innovation. But not every idea is meant to be disruptive. And many didn't have the preconditions to be disruptive from the outset.

We leveraged this experience by publishing The Disruption Test, a short framework for assessing whether an idea had the core attributes of a disruptive opportunity. Think of it as a quick and dirty litmus test.

The Disruption Canvas is an extension of that thinking. Where the test provided the initial filter, the canvas supports deeper exploration and refinement. It helps teams pressure-test early venture ideas through the lens of disruption, asking:

• Who is the market ignoring?

• What assumptions are no longer valid?

• Where can simplicity win?

• How will this scale without becoming the thing it set out to challenge?

The Disruption Canvas gives structure to ambiguity and focus to teams trying to do more than launch another incremental feature. 

How the Disruption Canvas Fits into the Landscape of Innovation Tools

There’s no shortage of canvas-style tools in the innovation world. The Business Model Canvas (BMC) is the most widely adopted (and for good reason). If you’ve already defined your target market and monetization strategy, and you need to articulate how the parts of your business fit together to deliver value, the BMC is the right tool. It helps teams align on what exists and optimize the mechanics of delivery.

The Product Go-To-Market (GTM) Canvas is another example. It’s useful for teams who are ready to commercialize a solution and need to clarify customer journeys, value props, channels, and growth strategies.

Other popular frameworks like the Lean Canvas and the Value Proposition Canvas serve critical roles in helping teams iterate on known ideas, refine target segments, and shape business models.

These tools focus on helping teams clarify and operationalize an idea (usually one that has already passed some threshold of validation or internal agreement). But when you're aiming to build something disruptive, the nature of the questions changes.

Disruptive ideas often look unpolished, unscalable, or even irrational when evaluated through these existing tools because they're not optimized for disruption. They're optimized for execution, alignment, and communication.

The Disruption Canvas is optimized for something else: identifying whether an idea has the potential to change the game. It pushes teams to investigate market blindspots, confront outdated assumptions, and find leverage in simplicity. The Disruption Canvas isn't just a tool to help you build something new, it's a tool to help you strategically create a product that couldn't have emerged from conventional thinking.

How to Use the Disruption Canvas

The Disruption Canvas is stacked vertically with each layer representing one of four essential conditions for disruption: desirability, reframing, feasibility, and impact & organization. Each of the ten individual modules is designed to help you think critically about your idea through the lens of simplicity, convenience, accessibility, and affordability while also examining the organizational capabilities needed to support it.

This is not a tool for pitching, it’s a tool for pressure-testing. Work through the modules in numerical order. Use short statements, not paragraphs. Treat blank boxes or weak answers as a signal. If a module is hard to complete, your idea might not be disruptive (yet). The canvas works best early in the process, before your product or model is fully formed.