Incongruities in Business

In Peter Drucker’s book “Innovation and Entrepreneurship”, Chapter 4 is dedicated to incongruities. He defines an incongruity as a discrepancy, a dissonance, between what is and what “ought” to be, or between what is and what everybody assumes it to be. In regards to business, an incongruity is a symptom of an opportunity to innovate.

In the book, he goes on to provide some good examples of incongruities in business and how they were resolved. He ends the Chapter by stating:

The incongruity within a process, its rhythm or its logic, is not a very subtle matter. Users (or customers) are always aware of it. What is lacking, however is someone willing to listen, somebody who takes it seriously what everyone proclaims: That the purpose of a product or a service is to satisfy the customer. If this axiom is accepted and acted upon, using incongruity as an opportunity for innovation becomes fairly easy-and highly effective.

The only limitation is most incongruities are identifiable to people only on the inside of a certain industry or service, and someone on the outside will not even be aware of it. It is up to an entrepreneur to identify it and take action in coming up with a solution to exploit the incongruity.