APRIL 2002 BROADSHEET - Living With Disruptive Technology
If any example of disruptive technology was required for the meeting on 28th March, the state of the A14 and the M11 on that evening were enough to drive everybody to despair. With news of accidents coming in hourly, including 100 crashed cars in one accident on the M4, it was amazing that we had such a good turnout at the St John's Innovation Centre for our meeting on "Living with Disruptive Technology".
Our two speakers, Dr Jeremy Klein of Scientific Generics and Dr Ward Hills of Technology for Industry, took it in turns to explain different aspects of how the understood version of this phenomenon works. They drew largely on the ideas of Clayton Christenson from his book "The Innovators Dilemma". Disruption occurs due to discontinuous S-curves; each company or industry thrives in turn on a new technology and then begins a down turn as a newcomer comes in with another technology meeting the same market needs. Quite often the new technology starts off in a completely different market and creeps in underneath as an inferior way of meeting an existing demand. It is thus very difficult, if not impossible, for the dominant producer to spot the threat.
There were many well known standard examples such as the telephone which at first only had a 3 mile range and the PC, like the first aeroplanes, was considered to be just a toy. Alternatively others thought at the time to be winners, eg. Ionica and the 5th Generation Computer Project, never made it. Some success spotting was indulged in - the General Motors electric car for China was one that apparently has the right hallmarks.
For more information you can contact Dr Jeremy Klein on jklein@scigen.co.uk and Dr Ward Hills on jwh@tfi-ltd.co.uk
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