Exponential & Disruptive Technologies

The parade of new technologies and scientific breakthroughs is relentless and is unfolding on many fronts. Almost any advance is billed as a breakthrough, and the list of “next big things” grows ever longer. Yet some technologies do in fact have the potential to disrupt the status quo, alter the way people live and work, rearrange value pools, and lead to entirely new products and services.

What is disruptive technology?

A disruptive innovation is an innovation that helps create a new market and value network, and eventually disrupts an existing market and value network (over a few years or decades), displacing an earlier technology. The term is used in business and technology literature to describe innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically first by designing for a different set of consumers in a new market and later by lowering prices in the existing market.

Exponential

Exponentially advancing digital technologies have led to exponentially accelerating innovation, making the environment increasingly difficult to navigate–but also opening the door to opportunity.

The rapid growth of exponential has significant implications. Powerful technologies including quantum computing, artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, additive manufacturing, and synthetic or industrial biology are ushering in new and disruptive competitive risks and opportunities for enterprises that have historically enjoyed dominant positions in their industries.

6 D’s of Exponential Technology

Author Steven Kotler explains the basic tenets of exponential technology growth cycles. Understanding these will allow savvy entrepreneurs to gain an advantage over their competition by way of exponential entrepreneurship.

Steven Kotler explains that the key to achieving exponential entrepreneurship is to understand the growth cycles of exponentially advancing technologies. These are broken up into the Six D’s.

Digitization: “A technology becomes exponential once it becomes digitized. It becomes represented in ones and zeroes. Once that happens, it becomes an information-based technology and it hops on an exponential growth curve. A classic example being Moore’s laws covering transitions.”

Deception: “These technologies get introduced and it takes a while for them to get up to speed, right. And there’s all this hype in the beginning and they fall into this deceptive period and people kind of dismiss them. 3D printing was in that deceptive period for a very, very long time. Robotics, AI, all these things. But all of the technologies that we’re talking about in Bold are now moving out of that deceptive period.”

Disruption: The technologies then play a role in subverting established industries. “A classic example is Uber. It’s totally disrupting the taxicab industry. Instagram totally disrupting Kodak. These are classic examples of the disruption.”

Demonetization: “For example, once you could store digital images on a camera, film was totally demonetized. And suddenly nobody was buying roll film anymore. Pixels did the same job. So the money comes out of the equation.”

Dematerialization: “Think about all the 1980s or ’90s technology that now come free with your cellphone, right? Peter and I did a calculation in Abundance and we were looking at this and we found the average cellphone houses over like a million dollars’ worth of technologies from the 1980s. You have your GPS locator, your encyclopedia, your radio and record player, your camera, video recorder, on and on and on, right. You can now, with Instagram, get access to editing software that 10 years ago was a $2 million package. And today it’s free with an Instagram account. So demonetization, dematerialization, the technology itself is disappearing. Nobody’s going out and buying cameras anymore because it comes on your smartphone.”

Democratization: “These technologies themselves become cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. Cellphones are a classic example. Back in the ’80s, these were a luxury technology that only the wealthiest could have and then it kind of slowly moved down the scale until where we are today. I mean 50 percent of the world … [is] carrying a supercomputer in their pocket. That’s how much these things have been democratized. Access becomes available to anyone.”

And that’s how you track the life cycle of an exponentially growing technology. Kotler uses smartphones as an example, but there are plenty of other applicable innovations that fit this paradigm. Amazon’s digital-distribution business model went through all these stages up until the point when access to hardly any product you could ever want became available with a swipe of the finger.

Think about what technologies today are currently making their way through the above life cycle. Where are points for growth? Which innovations appear to be headed toward a bright future? Identifying them is key to jumping into the realm of exponential entrepreneurship.

Exclusive video from the World Economic Forum

http://www.weforum.org Beware the Kodak moment, warns Peter H. Diamandis in this exclusive video for the World Economic Forum. Entrepreneur Diamandis –Co-Founder

“Anything that becomes digitized (biology, medicine, manufacturing, and so forth) hops on Moore’s law of increasing computational power.” – Peter Diamandis