The Activate team have created a terrific presentation on “Redefiners” and the opportunity to capture a share of the huge growth in media revenues that the intersection of tech and media will create. The presentation is on Slideshare and its worth reading the blog post introducing it from Anil Dash.

As we talk constantly to our clients about disruption, we were particularly interested in the idea that Redefiners are the successor to Disruptors. In the media/tech sector that they’re talking about, the Activate team talk about Redefiners being “natives” of the web/app era and really focused on providing a better customer experience. The opportunity is to pick off the most valuable customers from incumbents burdened by their legacy.

A passage of the presentation that especially resonated with us is urging incumbents to fight their legacy constraints by hacking their organisations to create virtual startups.

We’re working on several (as yet unannounced) projects where we are helping clients adopt an entrepreneurial mindset, using techniques like the minimum viable product as ways to test consumer appetite quickly, and create new routes to market. It’s easy to get clients excited by new ways of doing things when you show them quotes like this one from Venture Hacks: “The minimum viable product (MVP) is often an ad on Google. Or a PowerPoint slide. Or a dialog box. Or a landing page. You can often build it in a day or a week.”

Several of these projects are operating on the fringes of the client’s existing organization, and one of the biggest challenges is how and when to engage the rest of the business with the project. For digital product businesses, the answer may be to keep the two apart for as long as possible, as the new business may have the potential to eclipse the legacy business in a very short timeframe.

For consumer goods companies with physical products, the answer gets more complicated: one or two new product launches done in a disruptive or redefined way may have much more long term value as test cases for a new way of doing business than their short term cash value.

For this approach to work, its important that – contrary to the hacking mantra of ignoring everything that’s gone before – the virtual startup operation not only deeply understands the legacy business, but makes good calls on when to adopt existing structures (like sales and distribution), when to adapt them, and when to reject them and build something new.

As and when we get learnings we can share, we’ll post them here.