Kevin Surace, founder of Serious Energy, discusses disruptive innovation (innovation that disrupts an existing market). This is a segment from the full unscripted interview.

Kevin Surace 2011 Interview
Interview date: June 9, 2011
Interviewer: John McLaughlin, Historian and President of the Santa Clara Valley Historical Association

Interviewer's question:
"Could you talk about disruptive innovation?"

Transcript:
"You know we’ve talked about disruptive innovation here a lot. And for us, disruptive innovation means we have to take risks. We take risks as a company. We take risks as individuals. As individuals we want to encourage people to stand up at a meeting and say, “Hold it. I know it’s been done this way for 100 years. I’ve got this new idea and you’re going to think that I’m crazy. Those are the ones I want! We want to encourage customers that we have to tell us what their problems are. I think like, Steve Jobs at Apple, we don’t anticipate the customer’s going to tell us the product that they want. They’re going to tell us the slew of problems that they have. And then we can come up with the products that they want. Obviously, from a disruptive innovation standpoint, Steve Jobs is the epitome of it. And Steve is the epitome of it because he got fired for being too innovative and they brought him back and he was still too innovative and it just turned out he was right. He was right all along and they should have listened to him, but it was so innovative that it was disruptive, actually to the organization. And finally he came back with a nearly bankrupt company and now it didn’t matter how disruptive you were to the organization and you know, he might be the gentlest, kindest manager – and it just doesn’t matter. He’s right 75-80 percent of the time and when he’s right, he’s right big. The iPad is an amazing, you know 22 million sold or whatever it is already. So you have to think that’s a once in a lifetime find of a person that is so disruptive and got to be back in a place where they’d let him be that disruptive regardless of what was going on in the organization."

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