The first chapter defines an emerging technology as a “science based innovations that have the potential to create a new industry or transform an existing one.” It also goes on to define a technology as something that transforms knowledge into useful application.
I believe sets the stage for the rest of the chapters of the book by showing how a company or manager can redefine the way they look at business to survive in this rapidly changing technological environment.
The authors say that companies will suffer from three challenges when dealing with emerging technologies. Many managers will struggle with not knowing the new market or what kind of competition the new technology will have and that innovation brings with it a risk that is not just external but also internal. They also say that being just a follower of technology, which allows others to take risks, is no longer an option; companies need to be leaders. Lastly companies may suffer from a loss of competencies because an emerging technology requires new skills and knowledge.
The latter part of the chapter gives examples of companies that have survived through an emerging technology and those that have not. From those examples, the authors extract a variety of perspectives that will help combat the ill effects that innovative “chaos” can cause.
An interesting part of the chapter is where it talks about how some companies “stare death in the face” before making changes that radically shift their placement in the market. I found an article on disruptive innovation that explains that the economic downturn may be an avenue to companies engaging in new forms of innovation. According to the article,” the economic crisis can actually provide an innovation platform,” because after the initial triage, the company will start looking at its weak areas which will lead to restructuring and reinvention. I believe this article supports the Wharton chapter by showing that, while the companies in the article are not fighting against an ever-changing market, they are fighting against staying afloat.
A term that stuck out to me in the reading was “discontinuous innovation”. The authors used it in a way that seemed to me to be the precursor to an emerging technology. The term started me thinking about research I had done in past classes about “disruptive innovation.” After a bit of research, I found some similarities to the terms. According to one definition, a discontinuous innovation is “a completely new product such as the electric light bulb or perhaps the computer.” On the other hand, a disruptive innovation or technology is a “technological innovation that improves a product or service in ways that the market does not expect.” The two definitions seem pretty similar. Granted disruptive technology is defined as an improvement to an existing technology while discontinuous defined as a wholly new technology, I would argue that the use of the term 'disruptive' is a newer version of the older buzzword 'destructive'. It’s as if the experts in the field realized that it is very difficult to create something new and more realistic to talk about creating something different. Perhaps it is just semantics :)
Why an Economic Crisis Could Be the Right Time for Companies to Engage in 'Disruptive Innovation'. http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2086
http://en.mimi.hu/marketingweb/discontinuous_innovation.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_technology
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