On Tuesday and Wednesday of this week, I had the honor of participating on the 'Blogs, Wikis, and Virtual Realities' panel at The Nature Conservancy's ConEx conference in Vancouver. I presented virtually, and received some excellent questions from the professionals at the conference.
One question forwarded by Jonathon Colman, TNC's panel moderator, associate director of digital marketing for TNC, and all around great conservationist, was 'What is the big thing coming down the technology pipeline that will change everything?'. This is a frequent question I receive from clients, venture capital firms, and about every seat-mate on international flights. Unfortunately, the answer is not an easy one.
As is the case with picking the best wine, emerging technology is entirely a subjective experience. What works best for you may not be the thing that works best for other people. Just as each fingerprint is unique, so is each individuals or organizations interaction with technology.
The path this leads you down is that technology innovation is an iterative process. Sometimes the innovations and inventions are small (the new Apple laptops come to mind), and rarely they are a giant leap ahead. The interesting bit is that the degree of invention or innovation is most often not the determinant factor, but rather the ability of companies, people, and governments to integrate these technologies into the existing system of technology that they use.
An example: I will sell you a device today for your enterprise that will provide relevant and timely data to your employees in the areas they are working in, like personalized business intelligence. This would save your staff from 'Search', a tool that was useful when there were scarce assets on the Internet but provides less utility with each additional piece of data we add to the Internet or enterprise. Your employees will have the data they need to make important decisions BEFORE they even realize they need it. Sounds pretty good, right?
Now, go tell your existing database teams that you are going to upend their query structure and processes. Tell your corporate business intelligence people that you are democratizing BI for the masses. Listen as all of the infrastructure component teams (SharePoint, Unified Comms, Infosec) tell you how the new tool doesn't integrate with the legacy systems and that they will not support your purchase request.
So much for that idea.
I've written in the past about technologies like VRML (which suffered from lack of an ecosystem of hardware and network bandwidth to reach critical mass) and Broadband over Powerlines (which suffered/suffers from a dysfunctional regulatory regime for electricity delivery worldwide, as well as the occasional complacent risk-averse utility). These technologies were independently viable, however were not viable when transplanted into the real world. Like a body rejecting an organ transplant, the rest of the environment was hostile to the innovation.
What can you do?
As a vendor of emerging technologies, you can understand your customers business processes, and tailor your offering for their environment (integration with legacy tools is a painful but necessary boat-anchor). You can try a Trojan Horse approach of offering a reasonable degree of incremental functionality to get your foot in the door, then expand your offering greatly to allow your risk-friendly customer an excuse to provide to the inevitable organizational immune-response. Or, you can relegate yourself to the small but vibrant community of early-adopter customers that thrive on disruption and new technology opportunities.
You can read more about the broader framework in each of the Technology Intelligence Group's analysis reports, in addition to the focus on a particular technology. The technology AND the environment need to be ready for these technologies to be viable.
Adoption and diffusion of innovation is one piece of the emerging technology puzzle. The other two are combinatorial innovation and the broader global framework of economics and demographics. We'll be writing about these other two pieces of the puzzle next week.
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