To cut to the chase, can we all please agree that we are still only in the early stages of radical disruption of all media businesses?

A radical disruption that has been brought about mainly by the internet & its ability to change media consumption habits and reduce the power of old media models.  

If we all agree and start from this point then maybe we can look outside our media world and look at some of the lessons from other industries that have experienced the same disruption in the past.

How did companies in tech, music, transport or telecoms industries cope? Which companies survived and prospered? Which ones withered and died; and what can we learn as a result?

With all this in mind I was particularly interested to hear a keynote from Simon Waldman at Incisive Media’s E-Publishing Innovation Forum recently. Simon has recently left a senior digital position at The Guardian newspaper and joined LoveFilm.

His presentation “Creative Disruption – or OMG! The Internet ate my business” was based on an upcoming book of the same name. I wanted to list a few of the highlights for me and suggest that you pre-order his book (due out in October this year).

Simon started his talk by highlighting that a process of creative disruption is an essential fact of capitalism. He quoted Joseph Schumpeter from 1939 explaining that a railroad through new country “upsets all conditions of location, all cost calculations, all production functions within its radius of influence; and hardly any ‘ways of doing things’ which have been optimal before remain so afterwards.”