What is Technological Disruption?
A strange expression that evokes mixed feelings, combining the encouraging motivation of the word technological with the unusual and disconcerting disruption. But, in a way, that is what technological disruption is: a situation that breaks the mold of the established order with a plea of innovative originality that disturbs and changes the course of human development, redirecting the drive of creativity in a new direction.
The irruption of a technology that inevitably opens a new path through the monotony of the dominant technology. One that redirects research and development towards unexplored paths that lead to the emergence of new products and services.
Definition of Technological Disruption
This term, Disruption, was normally used in the economic sphere to define an event that changes the rules of the market game and directly affects society as a whole. However, it began to be directly associated with technology when, in 1997, Clayton M. Christensen, a professor at the Harvard Business School Press, published his article “The Innovator’s Dilemma” and how “When new technologies cause great firms to fail” in which a novel product, or an emerging technology, can upend an entire established and dominant industry. Where emerging companies, developing emerging technologies, end up becoming leaders and driving out of the market others that were once dominant and well established, for failing to adapt and innovate.
Hence the term disruption, in the sense of a break or abrupt interruption of the market. A change in the rules of the game.
In connection with the latter, we should also recall the concept of “Creative destruction” coined by the Austrian Joseph Schumpeter to describe his theories on the way entrepreneurship works as a stimulus to the capitalist system.
A fairly current example of the process defined by Clayton M. Christensen can be found in the irruption of an emerging company with its own technology that revolutionized the automobile market: Tesla. The evolution of this company since its founding in 2003 as Tesla Motors, to develop cars that do not depend on fossil fuels, has been spectacular.
Indeed, Tesla Motors represented a technological disruption in the electric car market, at a time when General Motors itself had just withdrawn from the market and destroyed all its EV1 models. With a market that was exhausting the path of the electric motor, Tesla emerged and quickly became a benchmark driving electric storage and propulsion technology.
In 2010, Tesla Inc. went public at a listing price of 17 USD, and 7 years later it reached a Nasdaq quotation of 361 USD, with a market capitalization higher than that of Ford Motor Company.
But, as Clayton M. Christensen noted in his article, consolidation in the market as a dominant company, and the evolution of a technology that no longer brings value to the user, leads to crisis. When the technology is no longer innovative, users have the perception of continuity, and of improvements in its evolution that bring nothing new.
Thus, Tesla today fails to be the catalyst it once was; the technology it provides is no longer disruptive, and the crisis begins.
We find, for example, this recent headline:
«Tesla sales plunge 30% compared to December and shares tumble 8% on Wall Street»
Mark Zuckerberg, known to everyone as the owner of Facebook, said these words in 2012 that illustrate what disruption means in the technology market:
Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough
Mark Zuckerberg, 2012.
Although on numerous occasions this expression has been misinterpreted, deliberately, what it actually conveys is the idea of the restlessness of an entrepreneurial mind seeking new paths to break the monotony of the established order. A mind that seeks the technological disruption that will change the world.
This is the idea that gave this blog its title, and which aims to be a meeting point for restless minds willing to contribute their grain of sand to a changing world.
Examples of Technological Disruption
Throughout history, there have been many technological milestones that have disturbed the balance of markets, generating a wave of new products and emerging technologies, and changing the solid structures of consolidated companies.
We can find historical examples that could be framed as disruptive technologies that changed everything in their time. Naturally, under different contexts and in isolated markets.
The printing press
Without any doubt, the irruption of the printing press in history was a great technological milestone that would drive human development by allowing the dissemination of ideas, essays and writings, bringing them to the most remote places they could not otherwise reach. We can surely imagine the great leap it represented when, around the year 1040, the first printing press was designed in China with porcelain pieces on rice paper (Bi Shèng), and the leap it represented in the West some 400 years later, especially for Christianity, when Johannes Gutenberg perfected the mechanism and printed the Bible.
It is not hard to imagine that the appearance of this mass printing technology completely displaced the work of the scribes in the scriptoria of medieval monasteries, where manuscripts were copied by hand.
The steam engine
This is possibly the clearest example in the history of humanity of a technological disruption affecting every sphere of humankind. A social, industrial, economic and scientific change, ultimately leading to what is known as the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries, which represented the greatest economic and social change since the Neolithic Revolution.
When the Scottish engineer and inventor James Watt patented his steam engine in 1769 — based, it must be said, on models from Alexandria of the 1st century — he may well have suspected the numerous applications it could have in industry, but I do not believe he could have grasped the impact it would have even on transport, the railway, the steamboat and even the first automobile
The telephone
When, in 1854, Antonio Meucci invented his teletróffoni, which Alexander Graham Bell later patented as the Telephone, he could already suspect that his invention was going to revolutionize the world of communications. It is another example of technological disruption in history that has generated, even up to the present day, changes in the ways people communicate with each other and transmit knowledge.
Many years later, in our own era, an evolution of the telephone into its mobile model brought about another technological disruption that revolutionized the industry.
And another evolution, from the mobile phone to the intelligent Smartphone, was a technological disruption that once again broke the rules of the game, leaving behind companies that were dominant in mobile telephony at the time, while emerging companies burst in with a new paradigm and have now consolidated themselves as market leaders.
The Internet
The network has been a clear disruptive technology that has changed the course of history and the development of humanity.
From 1969, when the ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) was created — the first network connecting computers between different institutions, created by the United States Department of Defense — until 2001, when people began to speak of the «dot-com crash», the technological disruption brought about by the appearance of the internet changed the concept of the company and redirected it towards a forced and obligatory digital presence on the network. If you were not on the internet, you did not exist.
Hence the success of internet-related companies in the late 1990s, with enormous growth from 1995, and the subsequent bursting of the bubble in 2001, with enormous losses when it ceased to be something disruptive and became an already consolidated fact.
It has been the cause of social and technological revolution and a key element in the advancement of science and technological development in recent times, by establishing a medium for disseminating content and a network of professional contacts worldwide.
BlockChain
The Internet has provided successive technological disruptions since its appearance. One of them, whose application has completely changed the concept of money, giving rise to multiple cryptocurrencies, has been BlockChain. A technology that appeared in 2009 as part of the BitCoin cryptocurrency concept, and which has brought about a financial revolution because of the security it provides in transactions since, in essence, the currency’s transaction information is public, and there is not a single copy in a bank; rather, all members of the community have that information.
This has brought numerous applications, or research initiatives, that are not restricted to the financial market, although many banks or listing systems, such as Nasdaq, are already using it. For example, distributed cloud storage or secure identity management are some of the initiatives under development with this technology.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence is by no means a novel concept; one could say that since the beginnings of computing and Boole’s propositional logic, the essence of automated reasoning has been present in mathematics. Although it was not until 1940, with the construction of the first digital computer, ENIAC, that the theory of artificial intelligence began to be developed, becoming consolidated with the publication in 1950 of Alan Turing’s article «Computing Machinery and Intelligence».
Despite being a concept that is almost two hundred years old, it is now, at the present time, that this technological disruption of AI is taking place, being applied in every area of the business world as a result of the irruption of technology for handling large data (Big Data), which makes it possible to perform data analysis and business intelligence across an infinite number of dimensions and depths of data.
In the same way, this technological disruption affects the scientific world, where AI is being developed on the basis of neural networks and other data analysis techniques to obtain new, unbiased conclusions, even from historical data already analyzed previously.
A two-hundred-year-old concept that even today represents the technological disruption of the future.
originally published on disrupciontecnologica
