In every industry, digital disruptors are taking advantage of new platforms, tools, and relationships to upend markets, undercut competitors, and get closer to customers. According to a new book from Forrester Research, Inc. (Nasdaq: FORR), Digital Disruption: Unleashing the Next Wave of Innovation (Amazon Publishing), the only way for established businesses to compete with digital disruptors is to start thinking and acting like one.

Written by Forrester Vice President and Principal Analyst James McQuivey, Digital Disruption draws from more than a decade of research and strategy work with companies across the globe. It will be published on February 19, 2013.

Digital Disruption lays out the necessary steps to take, and the tools to use, to disrupt any business. To succeed in today’s disruptive climate, businesses must first learn and adopt the digital disruptor’s mindset — take risks, invest as little as possible, and build on existing platforms to find the fastest path to solving a customer’s problem. Second, they must behave like a digital disruptor by flipping their thinking to focus on the products and services their customers want, instead of the new products they know they can easily market and sell. Lastly, businesses need to disrupt themselves by making disruption a C-level priority, eliminating internal barriers to disruption, and creating small internal teams to focus on disruptive opportunities.

“People think they know what digital disruption is, and they think they are prepared for it. What they don’t get is the impact it will have on their business once it hits them,” said McQuivey. “Traditional disruption took time and money and lots of it. With the free tools and existing platforms on the market today, digital disruption has the power to disrupt businesses at a pace that can be devastating to those operating under old-school rules.”

Digital Disruption also offers examples of individuals and companies that have successfully disrupted their competitors — from FerroKin, a small medical research company that managed to turn the costly and time-intensive clinical drug trails process in the pharmaceutical industry upside down, to the small team of mobile developers at Disney that created one of the most successful game apps by using existing internal resources and skills.

“Forrester has spent close to 30 years helping business, marketing, and IT executives navigate the disruptions within their industries,” said Forrester’s Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer Tom Pohlmann. “Digital Disruption builds on that guidance, providing clear calls to action for leaders who need to succeed against a new breed of competitors — one that excels at doing more with less.”

James McQuivey is the leading analyst tracking the development of digital disruption. He develops consumer models to help companies understand the power of digital consumers and strategy models to help companies in every industry prepare to serve those newly empowered consumers.

Digital Disruption is available for pre-order at Amazon.com. For more information on Digital Disruption visit Forrester.com/digitaldisruption.

About Forrester Research

Forrester Research, Inc. (Nasdaq: FORR) is an independent research company that provides pragmatic and forward-thinking advice to global leaders in business and technology. Forrester works with professionals in 17 key roles at major companies providing proprietary research, customer insight, consulting, events, and peer-to-peer executive programs. For more than 29 years, Forrester has been making IT, marketing, and technology industry leaders successful every day. For more information, visit http://www.forrester.com/.

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