Luke Williams, a fellow at frog design and adjunct professor at NYU Stern, recently posted a brilliant article on Mashable entitled “How To: Develop Ideas That Will Disrupt Your Industry.” From an entrepreneur’s perspective, this is a brilliant methodology to thinking out of the box and innovating to transform an entire industry. Let’s look at the steps Luke suggests to do disrupt an industry from his article:

Step I: What Do You Want to Disrupt?

The first step is to define the situation in the industry, segment, or category that you want to challenge. And by “situation,” I mean the broad view from 10,000 feet. This should be an area of your industry in which everyone seems to be stuck, and nothing has changed in a very long time.

Step II: What Are the Business Clichés?

Now that you’ve defined what you want to disrupt, the next step is to identify the assumptions that seem to influence the way insiders (and often outsiders) think about your situation. In other words, what are the clichés — the widespread, hackneyed beliefs that govern the way people think about and do business in a particular space. If you pay attention, you’ll notice that clichés are everywhere.

Step III: What Are Your Disruptive Hypotheses?

Now that you have a list of the clichés that are influencing the business situation you’re focused on, your next goal is to start provoking the status quo by generating several disruptive hypotheses: seemingly crazy ways to fill in the blank part of the question, “I wonder what would happen if we ________?”

Disrupting the Recruitment Industry

This type of thinking has created companies such as ZipCar and Netflix. These companies have disrupted entire industries and changed the very foundation for how we rent and/or purchase cars and movies. Through the years they are becoming the very foundations for these certain aspects in our lives.

So how can the recruitment industry utilize this type of methodology? How can the industry itself be disrupted to the point where it becomes the new norm for hiring or applying for a job? Social media has changed the way we communicate, but it hasn’t disrupted the process of applying for jobs online – i.e.: LinkedIn is turning into a job board just like a Monster.com.

There are probably thousands of clichés one could list regarding the online recruitment industry, so I will leave that up to you. But as Luke asks, “I wonder what would happen if we…?” Steps I & II are easy to fill in the blanks. Step III is simply taking the industry and turning those clichés 180 degrees around. It is this out of the box thinking that challenges the industry as a whole and in the process could create a monster of innovation.

From a job seeker perspective, the most frustrating part of the online recruitment process is the lack of communication between the employer and the potential candidate. Job seekers are stuck in limbo after they submit a resume with the communication channel shut off to them. This example could be the “disruptive hypotheses” to focus our attention on.

So, if we took these three Steps, put our heads together and utilized this type of strategy, I wonder how we could disrupt this industry that has been the standard for the last 15 years?

The original article from Luke Williams can be found here: http://mashable.com/2011/02/17/disruptive-thinking-innovation/