Recently I wrote about the diffusion of technologies into personal and corporate technology systems as a key component to emerging technology innovation. Although there is always the risk that any new technology will not work, this technological failure is most often weeded out in early product development or market trials. One of the key factors is more often how the new invention is adopted as part of the broader ecosystem of technology that surrounds all of us. If it doesn't fit with our current relationship or systems of technology, and requires widespread change (as opposed to incremental additional functionality), then it's odds of success are low.
Another contributing factor that seems remarkably obvious, however seldom receives it's due attention, is the dependent supporting technologies required for the new emerging technology to thrive. If it's a new broadband video service like the Roku/Netflix brick, or Hulu, then you need video codec technologies to be at a certain maturity level, processor on a chip technologies to be at a mature price point for the Roku brick, and pervasive broadband.
Because these existing technology underpinnings are either so pervasive that we are inured to them (broadband) or invisible plumbing (video codecs, chip technologies), we often overlook these dependencies when developing new technologies.
When I ran the emerging technology scouting group at my last employer, one of the key employee interview questions I would ask was "What is your favorite emerging technology, and what is it going to take for it to become mainstream?". It demonstrated the maturity of the thinking process of the candidate vis-a-vis all of the externalities that come into play when incubating a technology from 'a possibility to a probability'. It may be that the technology itself is 100% viable, however there are one or more missing components of the ecosystem that will prevent it's success. It may be a hostile tax or regulatory environment. It may be disharmony between United States and European intellectual property regimes. In other words, "It may have nothing directly to do with the technology in question, but everything to do with the world it is planted in."
You can see this today in everything from Electric Cars, windfarms, virtual worlds and virtual reality technologies, and so forth. There have been excellent innovations in each of these areas, however mainstream adoption is elusive due to the lack of the remainder of the ecosystem not yet being built out. These other components will eventually arrive, most likely driven by incremental innovation in their respective fields or some freak accident of regulation, that will suddenly render prior inventions viable given the new playing field, as well as catalyze a new generation of inventions.
I compare this combinatorial innovation process to a gourmet chef. We all have the makings of a five-star meal in our ice box, however the chef can take those ingredients and combine them in a particular sequence to realize superior value from them. In the same way, the greatest pleasure I get from watching innovation develop over the last forty years is when a technologist takes available ingredients and teases something amazing from them that you didn't intuitively see laying around.
Most recently, there have been examples of these firms that have looked at the available ingredients in chips, codecs, broadband, and the vast video and audio assets in this great age of digitization to develop things like Lala (which has been technically possible for greater than a decade, but was missing business contracts and the right competitive environment for record labels to motivate them), the Amazon Kindle (which was lacking cost-effective e-paper technology and a broad library of content), and the legion of new NetFlix players to provide effectively-free video-over-broadband, which required not only the innovations previously listed above, but also a legal environment conducive to over-the-top video services and the component costs to be low enough to make these devices cost effective to manufacture.
This leads to the third post in the series, which will follow shortly, focusing on global demographics and economics and how they play a key role in the adoption of any emerging technology. Stay tuned.
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Posted by: ClubPenguin | August 17, 2010 at 02:01 AM