Lots of individuals mistakenly believe it’s a technology that drives innovation. Yet from the definitions above, that’s clearly not true. It’s a chance that defines innovation and technology that enables innovation. Consider the classic”Build a better mousetrap” example taught in most business schools. You may have the technology to construct a better mousetrap, but in case you’ve got no mice or the old mousetrap works well, there’s absolutely no chance and the On the other hand, if you’re overrun with mice then the chance exists to innovate a product with your technology.
Another example, one with which I’m intimately familiar, are consumer electronics startup businesses. I have been associated with those that succeeded and those who failed. People who failed could not find the chance to come up with a purposeful innovation using their technology. Actually, to survive, these firms had to sew faithfully into something entirely different and if they were lucky they could benefit from derivatives of the original farmer site. More often than not, the first technology wound up in the garbage heap.
Technology, thus, is an enabler whose greatest value proposition is to make improvements to our lives. So as to be relevant, it has to be used to make innovations that are driven by chance. Many companies list technology as one of the competitive benefits. Technology develops along two paths – an evolutionary path and a radical route. A revolutionary technology is one that enables new businesses or enables solutions to issues that were previously not feasible. Not only did it spawn new businesses and products, but it spawned other revolutionary technology – transistor technology, integrated circuit technology, microprocessor technology.
All of which provide lots of the goods and services we consume now. Taking a look at the number of semiconductor companies that exist now (with new ones forming daily ), I would say not. Not as many businesses, but you’ve got Intel, AMD, ARM, and a plethora of organizations building custom quad-core chips (Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm, etc). So again, not a great deal of competitive advantage. Competition from competing technologies and effortless access to IP mitigates the perceived competitive advantage of any specific technology.
Android vs iOS is a fantastic illustration of how this works. Apple used its technology to present iOS and gained an early market advantage. However, Google, using its version of Unix (a rival technology), caught up relatively fast. The reasons for this lie not in the underlying technology, but in the way the goods made possible by these technologies were brought to market (free vs. walled garden, etc.) as well as the gaps in the strategic visions of every corporation. Evolutionary technology is one that incrementally builds upon the foundation of revolutionary technology.
But by its very nature, the incremental change is easier for a competitor to match leapfrog. The customer went back to picking Company A or Company V based on cost, service, policy, whatever, but not based on technology. Thus technology could have been applicable in the short term, but in the long run, it became irrelevant. In the world today, technologies tend to quickly become commoditized, and within any specific technology lies the seeds of its own passing. This article was written from the perspective of an end client.
The additional one is removed from the technology, the less relevant it becomes. To a programmer, technology can resemble a product. An empowering product, but a product nonetheless, and thus it’s highly relevant. Bose uses a proprietary signal processing technology to allow products that fulfill a set of market conditions and therefore the technology and what it enables is pertinent to them. Their clients are more worried about how it sounds, what is the cost, what is the quality, etc., and not so much with how it’s attained, thus the technology Recently, I was involved in a discussion on Google about the new Motorola X telephone.
A whole lot of the folks on those posts slammed the phone for a variety of reasons – cost, locked boot loader, etc.. There were also lots of knocks on the fact that it did not have a quad-core chip like the S4 or HTC One that were priced similarly. What they failed to grasp is that if the producer used 1, 2, 4, or 8 cores at the end makes no difference so long as the phone can provide a competitive (or even best of course ) feature set, performance, cost, and consumer experience. The iPhone is among the most prosperous phones ever produced, and it runs on a dual-core chip. It delivers one of the best user experiences in the industry.
