See That Market Over There: A Playbook for Capturing It
Competitor noise is your friend. A practical guide to finding an unguarded market, entering it on the right axis, and building an advantage the incumbents can’t catch up to feature-by-feature.
By Herbert “Bert” Roberts, P.E.
This is the companion piece to The 75% Signal, which laid out the forensic case for why mature-market leaders keep missing disruptions aimed straight at them. This piece flips that diagnosis into instructions. If you’re an engineer, founder, or R&D lead looking at a market you don’t yet own, here is the sequence that has worked — checked against real cases, including the ones where it didn’t quite work, because those failures teach the boundaries of the method.
Step One: Target an Oligarchy, Not a Monopoly
People point at monopolies and cry foul. Don’t aim there. A monopoly is a single, unified target with no internal fracture — hard and expensive to dislodge.
An oligarchy of three or more incumbents is a softer target, and it’s softer for a specific, exploitable reason: each incumbent is watching the other two, not you. Detroit’s Big Three benchmarked each other on horsepower and styling. The business-jet flagships — Gulfstream, Dassault, Bombardier — benchmark each other on cabin volume and range. That mutual watching is a standing distraction. They are already spending resources fighting each other for the top spot inside a closed reference frame, which means none of them are spending resources watching the ground underneath all three of them at once.
Don’t aim at the bullseye — the metric the three of them are already fighting over. Aim just off-center, at whatever axis none of them are competing on, and their internal competition becomes your cover. Competitor noise is your friend: the louder they fight each other, the less attention is left over to notice you.
Diagnostic: find a market with three or more incumbents locked in a visible pecking-order fight. That fight is the signal you’re looking at a viable target.
Step Two: Define the Solution Set for the Neglected-Not-Exhausted Technologies
This is the whole consult in one sentence. If you only ever say one thing to a CEO, say this: define the solution set for the neglected-not-exhausted technologies. Everything else in this playbook exists to get you to the point where you can act on that sentence correctly.
Once you’ve found your oligarchy, identify what they’re no longer competing on. It’s rarely hidden — it’s usually the thing their current, wealthiest, most vocal customers don’t need, and therefore never ask for.
Here’s the method, not just the instinct:
Map the technology stack. For any oligarchy, break the product down into its ten or so constituent technologies — for business jets: airframe materials, engine efficiency, avionics, cabin pressurization, noise reduction, crew-requirement architecture, fuel economics, manufacturing process, certification pathway.
Rank by competitive investment, not by importance. Order the ten by how much visible R&D attention, marketing emphasis, and patent activity the incumbents are currently pouring into each — not by what matters most to the end customer. The top two or three are where the oligarchy is fighting itself (cabin volume, digital cockpit). The bottom half is where nobody’s racing anymore.
Split the bottom half into exhausted versus neglected. This is the filter that separates real opportunity from a dead end. Some low-ranked technologies are low-ranked because they’re genuinely solved — correctly abandoned, nothing left to find. Others are low-ranked only because the current customer doesn’t value them, not because the technology itself is tapped out. Crew-requirement architecture was a bottom-ranked technology in the business-jet flagship segment — not because it was solved, but because the flagship buyer doesn’t care about crew cost. That’s neglect, not exhaustion, and there’s a buyer waiting on the other side of it.
Define the solution set for what’s neglected, not what’s exhausted. This is where outside-discipline thinking earns its keep — cross-domain analogy, TRIZ contradiction resolution, adjacent-industry patent scanning — applied specifically to the technologies your ranking just proved are viable but unattended.
Detroit’s buyer wasn’t asking for reliability in 1965; they got it from brand loyalty instead. Gulfstream’s buyer isn’t asking for lower crew cost; they’re not price-sensitive at $75 million. The unaddressed layer isn’t a secret — it’s simply invisible from inside a measurement system built around the current customer.
Diagnostic: build the ten-technology ranking for your target oligarchy. Anywhere the bottom half is neglected rather than exhausted is your entry point.
Step Three: Check Where You Are on Your Own Curve
If you’re already inside an industry, this step applies to you directly: track the marginal-return curve on whatever technology or process your own organization currently leans on. Below roughly 75% of its practical ceiling, keep pushing it — real, comparatively cheap gains are still available there.
Past 75%, treat that as a standing trigger, not a warning to note and move past. Field a second effort, staffed and resourced independently from the first, whose only job is finding a different curve to climb — one starting near zero, where the first cheap gains are still on the table.
Diagnostic: if your organization’s core technology hasn’t meaningfully improved per R&D dollar in the last several cycles, you’re likely past the threshold and should already have a second team looking elsewhere.
Step Four: Recruit From Outside the Industry’s Gene Pool
Once you know which curve you’re climbing, staff it deliberately from outside the incumbents’ own talent pool. Don’t hire from the stagnant companies. Their veterans are the people most thoroughly trained not to see what you need them to see — every instinct they bring in is calibrated to the paradigm you’re trying to escape.
HondaJet’s lead designer, Michimasa Fujino, came from automotive aerodynamics and NASA computational fluid dynamics research, not a career inside the business-jet industry. Southwest’s founder, Herb Kelleher, was a lawyer, not an airline executive. Richard Branson entered aviation with no background in it at all — his own team called the barriers to entry immense, and he crossed them anyway, precisely because he wasn’t carrying the industry’s own assumptions about what an airline had to be.
Location matters the same way talent does. Honda built its aircraft headquarters in Greensboro, North Carolina — not Wichita, the established aviation cluster with all its shared talent, suppliers, and inherited assumptions. The same company built its first major U.S. auto plant in Marysville, Ohio, not Detroit. Proximity to an established industry cluster imports that industry’s thinking by osmosis, through hiring, informal socializing, and the quiet sense of “how it’s done.” Distance protects your team’s ability to think differently before day one.
Diagnostic: if your founding or leadership team has deep tenure inside the industry you’re trying to disrupt, you likely need outside voices before you start, not after.
Step Five: Solve the Must-Be Layer First — Completely, Not Minimally
This is the step most new entrants get wrong, and it’s the one that determines whether the whole effort survives contact with the market.
Win on basics first. It changes a buyer’s mind faster than any delighter can, because a must-be attribute removes a reason to say no, while a delighter only adds a reason to say yes — and removing doubt is always faster than building enthusiasm, especially for an expensive or unfamiliar purchase.
More than that: delighters lose their impact entirely if the basics are wonky. A gorgeous product built on a shaky foundation doesn’t read as luxury — it reads as compensation, and it actively erodes trust rather than building it. Japanese automakers understood this instinctively: engine and transmission reliability came first, styling and luxury trim came only once reliability was no longer in question. HondaJet followed the identical order — the over-the-wing engine mount, composite fuselage, and laminar-flow wing were all proven over a decade of real flight hours before the company asked regulators and buyers to trust a single-pilot, transcontinental-range aircraft.
Southwest Airlines is the clearest low-cost version of this principle, and it’s the case worth studying if you don’t have Honda’s decades or budget. A single aircraft type, ten-minute turnarounds, point-to-point routing — pure operational discipline, no novel engineering required, executed more completely than any incumbent running a mixed fleet and hub-and-spoke network was willing to match. Only once that cost and reliability foundation was bulletproof did Southwest add its modest delighters: free checked bags, flexible changes, no change fees.
Diagnostic: before you spend a dollar on anything a customer would call “delightful,” ask whether the fundamental a skeptical buyer would check first is not just adequate but demonstrably, provably better than the incumbent’s. If it isn’t, that’s where the next dollar goes.
Step Six: Know Which Kind of Disruptor You’re Being
Not every entry requires solving new physics. There are two distinct paths, and picking the wrong one for your situation wastes the advantage the first five steps built.
The engineering disruptor has to solve a hard, unsolved technical problem before anything else — HondaJet had no existing airframe paradigm to borrow, so proving the fundamentals wasn’t optional. This path takes longer and costs more, but the resulting advantage, once built, tends to compound across several interdependent technologies at once rather than a single metric — which is what makes it hard for an incumbent to catch up feature-by-feature. A five-point simultaneous lead isn’t chaseable the way a single-point lead is, because the improvements are load-bearing on each other; catching up requires re-deriving the whole architecture, not patching the old one.
The experience disruptor borrows technology that’s already solved elsewhere and wins purely on delivery. Virgin Atlantic didn’t need to invent jet engines — those were mature, off-the-shelf technology by 1984 — so Branson could win entirely on service and experience from day one, because the hard physics problem had already been solved by someone else decades earlier.
The failure mode to watch for is applying the experience-disruptor playbook to a problem that actually required the engineering-disruptor playbook. Virgin Galactic is the clean cautionary case: two decades of brand-building and ticket deposits sold around a vehicle whose core engineering — safe, repeatable, commercially-cadenced spaceflight — still wasn’t solved. The delight came first and came loud; the fundamentals are still catching up to the marketing years later. Virgin Cola and Virgin Cars are smaller versions of the same mistake — brand and delight applied where there was no real structural gap underneath to protect the bet once the excitement wore off. Branson himself later acknowledged misjudging where the actual disruption opportunity in the auto industry was — it was in propulsion, not in how cars were sold.
Diagnostic: ask honestly whether the technology underneath your idea is already mature and solved somewhere else, or whether you are the one who has to solve it. If you’re not sure, assume you have to solve it — the engineering-disruptor path is the safer default, because it’s recoverable from over-delivery on fundamentals in a way the reverse mistake isn’t.
Step Seven: Enter Small, Stay Below the Alarm Threshold
Don’t launch where the incumbents are already looking. HondaJet’s Very Light Jet segment shares almost no customer overlap with Gulfstream’s or Dassault’s ultra-long-range flagship buyers — so strong growth there simply doesn’t register on the incumbents’ instruments. Southwest launched with three Texas cities, not a national challenge. Both waited to prove the model somewhere too small to trigger a response before climbing toward the incumbents’ own territory.
Diagnostic: if your launch plan would immediately show up on an incumbent’s competitive radar, you’re entering too big, too early, or too close to their existing customer base.
Close
None of this requires being smarter than the incumbents. It requires picking a target with an internal fracture already built in, finding the layer their own success has trained them not to watch, staffing outside their gene pool, solving that layer completely before chasing delight, knowing honestly which kind of disruptor you are, and starting small enough that their competitor noise covers your entry instead of drowning you out.
The companies at the top of the S-curve aren’t beatable by matching them. They’re beatable by not fighting them at all.
Herbert Roberts, P.E. is a licensed professional engineer with 32 years in aviation research and development across three companies, and has spent eight years analyzing accidents under his P.E. license.
References
See The 75% Signal for the full source list underlying the HondaJet, Detroit, and business-jet-flagship cases. Additional sources for this piece:
ResearchGate, “Case Study: Southwest Airlines Strategies”
Simple Flying, “How Southwest Pioneered The Low Cost Carrier Model”; “Why One Of The World’s Biggest Airlines Bet Its Future On A Single Aircraft Family”
PortersFiveForce.com, “Brief History of Southwest Airlines Company”
CNBC, “Virgin Group: Richard Branson’s companies from records to space travel,” 2019
CNBC, “Richard Branson, who never liked cruising, looks to disrupt the industry with Virgin Voyages,” 2021
Strategy+Business, “How Richard Branson Works Magic,” 1998
Kritarth’s Substack, “The History of Virgin Atlantic”
AMW Business Group, “Richard Branson’s Business Empire: Virgin’s Global Success,” 2026
Virgin Galactic Holdings, Q1 and Q2 2026 financial results and business updates
StockTi, “Virgin Galactic Advances 2026 Flight Plans Amid Narrowed Loss and Cash Concerns”