New technologies emerge in a far shorter time span than ever before in the history of mankind. While many of these technologies are incremental improvements over what is already available, others completely break from the pattern and redefine entire industries, change our mode of thinking about something, or just introduce new concepts to our knowledge bank.
In his 1997 best-selling book, "The Innovator’s Dilemma," Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen segregates new technology into two categories: sustaining and disruptive. Sustaining technology relies on incremental improvements to an already established technology, while Disruptive technology is new, and unexpectedly displaces an established technology. By its very nature, disruptive technologies lack refinement, often have performance problems because these are new, appeal to a rather limited audience, and may not yet have a proven practical application.
While ‘marketability’ of new technologies depends on a number of factors, both sustaining and disruptive technologies have a larger role to play in our life. For instance, a disruptive technology like the ubiquitous Internet introduced a whole new way of linking information assets together, while gradual improvements of the first prototypes of the ‘Internet’ at CERN led to the public Internet as we know it today. Similarly, technologies like the ‘Search Engine’ came about in response to a need to find information in the hyperlinked environment. And it wasn’t really Yahoo or Google that really started the wave. It was a search algorithm called Archie, and the Gopher-enabled Veronica and Jughead, which were the precursors to what we see as ’search engines’ today.
Disruptive Technologies enable us to think in dimensions we didn’t think of, and in that lies their utility and power. These help us expand our knowledge base as a society and as individuals and solve problems we didn’t quite know as problems. The trouble is, it’s difficult to segregate a disruptive technology from chaos that surrounds research, from all the hyperbole that accompanies every new product or technology launch announcement. There is no mantra that can enable you to distinguish between a disruptive technology that can alter the landscape and marketing fluff most organizations indulge in. The only true test is time, the only testbed the entire mass of users on the Internet. And yet, we hardly have any other alternative to technology solving so many of our challenges today.
Imagine a technology so clean and green that it enables cars to run 200 miles on a single bottle of water, or a device that use nature itself to purify water and help soil regain fertility in millions of villages in Asia and Africa, or a medicine that can be embedded in the genetic code of an individual and enables the body to produce its own defence mechanisms. And then there’s business. How about giving the power to design an infrastructure so vast as Google’s to a kid in his backyard. There could be millions of other examples where disruptive technologies are not only desirable, but also the only answer.
Disruptive technologies emerge from the chaos that surrounds us and the best thing we could do is to create an environment which stimulates these technologies to come to the fore. We, including our leaders in business and society at large, have to be tolerant of chaos and build strategic capability to solve problems of the future rather than concentrating on today.
We owe it to ourselves, and to our future generations, to let disruptive technologies gain acceptance. There may be little we could do as individuals, besides being patient with technologists and researchers as they create the next big thing, but collectively, we can create an environment that lets distruption become the norm. Here’s to that next ‘disruption’ - whatever that is, whenever it comes on, wherever it happens!
