Disruption is often considered a negative force that threatens business success. In an age of constant change, disruption has become a path to innovation.

The average lifespan of a corporation in the S&P 500 is approximately 18 years, compared to 61 years in 1958. The shortening life of companies is largely a consequence of failing to anticipate and manage disruption. The businesses focus on the core operations and functions that are currently producing profit, in order to maintain today's business, limiting innovation to enhancements of current products and services.

When innovations from outside the organization appear, many generated by startups, current market share is lost forever or potential markets are never captured. A proposed solution is a business model that anticipates disruptive threats and generates transformative innovation through collaboration between large companies and startups. The collaboration is a blending of low-risk internal opportunities in next-generation improvements and high-risk entrepreneurial transformative advances.

The Ambidextrous Organization: Myth or Truth?
Authors Charles O'Reilly and Michael Tushman originated the theory of organizational ambidexterity approximately six years. This approach decouples explorative innovation from innovating the existing core business and says that organizations successful in pursuing both incremental and disruptive innovations simultaneously have to put the right supportive structure in place.

It has been discounted by some business consultants for several reasons, but one of them is that the theory of organizational ambidexterity believes organizational structure alone assures a company some degree of long-term success. Another reason is the belief the research supporting the study results was not statistically valid enough to lead to the conclusions. The ambidextrous organization decouples explorative innovation from innovating the existing core business, so the question is whether the separation is wise or can work.

Though some people call it the myth of the ambidextrous organization, there are also professionals who believe the theory has some validity in a disruptive business environment but maybe not to the degree the authors suggest.

One of the fascinating aspects of business today is that the ideal model for managing disruption has yet to be developed because it has been difficult keeping up with the pace of change. The rate of change in technology alone is a major market disrupter.

Pursuing Dual Goals Through Collaboration
One of the paradoxes in the business world is that large firms have difficulty initiating and managing transformative innovation, relying on their established market to keep business going, and small firms have innovative ideas but not access to the market needed to grow a new business. This suggests that large companies should partner with incubators and startups, enabling the firms to leverage their capabilities and assets. This is an emerging form of the ambidextrous organization because it incorporates internal and external innovation, allowing the business to pursue dual goals of building out the existing product line and finding new ones that are aligned with the current mission.

Managing disruption through collaboration makes sense in a hyper-connected world. Business incubators have historically been focused on creating new stand-alone businesses. There is also a new brand of incubators emerging in which a large corporation sponsors a startup for incubation, giving the startup access to resources like cash, R&D and suppliers. Either way, the powerful corporation and the entrepreneur collaborate on innovation, creating managed disruption in both their favor, and leading to new markets.

The R&D function is created to produce innovation. One of the reasons companies have difficulty with market disruptions, finding themselves falling behind new competitors, is that R&D is focused on building out the existing core business. Designing the next-generation of existing products or services is naturally limiting and tends to put the focus on finding solutions to business problems rather than finding market changing innovation.

Finding solutions only requires enhancing existing products. Finding market changing innovation requires thinking outside the status quo and innovating as an entrepreneur. A corporate-incubator collaboration can lead to transformative innovation that may disrupt the marketplace. The inherent risks associated with purposely creating disruption has held some companies back from collaborating with entrepreneurial startups, but this type of collaboration is precisely what the large companies need to overcome their lumbering approach to creating new ideas.

Proactively Innovating
Cisco embraces the idea of partnering with tech startups because leaders realize that a single company cannot possibly innovate on its own due to the complexity of technology. In response, the company began opening Innovation Centers in major global cities like London, Barcelona and Tokyo. Cisco's partners collaborate with each other and with Cisco to co-innovate and accelerate disruptive solutions.

The retail giant Lowe's is another example of a company that is proactively innovating through partnerships with smaller companies. Lowe's Innovation Labs explore potential applications for disruptive technologies and rapidly prototypes new technology in real-world labs. Areas addressed include robotics, on-demand manufacturing, innovating for impact (sustainability projects), collider (new business model for interacting with Indian innovation ecosystem), and AR/VR tools (augmented, mixed and virtual reality tools for transforming visualization for customers).

In the 2015 US Innovation Survey, Accenture points out that companies must be able to quickly test new ideas and absorb new capabilities and talent from other industries. Clinging to rigid innovation approaches makes it more likely a business will fail at creating space for disruptive innovation or generating new ideas.

Anticipating and managing disruptions is leading to new partnerships like the corporate-incubator collaborations, and new business models like the dual operating model that Accenture discusses which, on the one-hand, focuses on enhancing existing products and capabilities while, on the other hand, also drives innovations.

The businesses that learn to harness speed-to-market and disruptive innovation are the ones most likely to succeed over the long-term. Startups have great opportunities today to partner with large companies hungry to embrace innovation. Innovation collaborations enable all participants to leverage each other's resources and capabilities to improve operations and open up the world of innovation.

For these collaborations to work, it must be the right partnership supported by the right corporate structure, visionary leadership, and culture. It is not easy but is the best path to sustainability.