Disruptive innovation: a term that just oozes single-minded doggedness.

It’s a middle-finger at the status-quo and a salute to vision, progression and the future. And there have been many disruptive innovations to speak-off in recent years.

The music industry is a good example of how disruptive innovation has really shifted the goalposts. Napster, for example, kick-started the digital music revolution and popularised the notion of ‘downloading’ music. Whilst Spotify is also playing a major role in bringing digital music streaming to the masses…legally.

Google: the ultimate game-changer

Google, too, has been a major game-changer over the past decade. Was it the first search engine? Far from it – there was at least twenty before it, including names you may recognise such as Lycos, AltaVista, Excite and Yahoo!

Google was pretty late into the search-engine game, but it disrupted the search status quo and changed the Web’s landscape forever. How did Google do that, exactly?

Well, in a world of near-infinite information, you need two things to make all that data useful: boosters and filters. The former pushes the information out into cyberspace, and the latter helps people separate the relevant data from the cacophonous crackle of the white-noise web.

Before Google, search engines did do a bit of the boosting and filtering. But I do stress ‘a bit’. They did help tell you what was popular across the Web, but they didn’t always tell you what you wanted to know in relation to your search terms. Cue Lawrence E. Page and Sergey M. Brin, Stanford University students and the founders of Google.

What Brin and Page’s model focussed on was putting the most useful information at the top of the pile, and as the internet has evolved, Google has definitely helped ‘grade’ online knowledge so that users always get the most relevant and useful information based on their search.

Today, we see local playing a key part in taking search into the local community, whilst the likes of Google Translate makes the web-browsing experience a truly global endeavour that transcends language and borders. Google didn’t just shift the goalposts, it moved them into another dimension and moulded them into an entire football stadium. Excuse the poor analogy.

We’re in 2011 now; the World Wide Web is twenty years old this year (August 6th, to be precise…). Looking back on two decades of the Web, who have the major disruptive innovators been, besides Google?

And remember, we’re not talking simply about ‘pretty cool’ or ‘interesting’ – there have been many that fall into the lesser category of ‘sustaining innovation’, people and companies that have done brilliant things within their industry but haven’t had any real lasting effect on the digital or social landscape.

The likes of Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Skype and Amazon all changed the rules of engagement.  They have not only changed their industry but also disrupted the status quo across society.

Forbes-Disrupt: blur Group is third most disruptive company in the world

And with blur Group and the Creative Services Exchange, we are a growing disruptive force within the creative services industry.

Don’t believe us? Believe this – Forbes-Disrupt.com has named blur Group at number 3 in its Top 25 Most Disruptive Companies 2011 list.

WPP better watch out, the status quo is about to change.