Spotting Disruptive Technology - Why It Matters

This is the first part of a mini-series on how to identify, analyse and react to disruptive technology. On this article we discuss why we need to be constantly looking for disruptive technologies.


As a PM one of the hardest things is to keep an eye on disruptive technologies and their likely impact on our product lines. In many cases it is nearly impossible to find time just to keep up to date on developments in our own field. Like in any other job we are focused on the daily routine and immediate needs of our product and on its internal and external customers. It is hard to find time to look beyond the immediate and work out what is happening out there in the big wide world.

Yet identifying disruptive technology is one of our most critical tasks – to bring a trivial yet valid example; there were probably teams of PM all working diligently on the latest features of typewriters such as electric, quieter, better ink ribbons whilst over at IBM, Microsoft and Apple they were busy working on mass produced PCs with word processors. There are numerous examples of major disruptive technologies appearing from no where and killing an industry dead almost overnight – DVD and videos – digital and film cameras.

However, identifying disruptive technologies is actually a difficult task, for several reasons -

1. It requires a substantial on going investment in general reading and research – something that we will all normally put off until next week when things are quieter.
   
2. It is often very difficult to identify where the challenge is coming from; in many cases the threat comes from out of market and not from our traditional competition. Did the typewriter teams keep an eye on the emerging computing market? Did Nokia spot what Apple were planning? Apple were a new player in Nokia's market, yet managed to blend their existing product capabilities with some new technology and a Palm Pilot concept and Nokia are still licking their wounds several years later.
   
3. The speed of development – all too often by the time you have heard of the threat it is (almost) too late.

Unfortunately, without have constant focus on disruption, we will always be surprised. Our natural focus is on incremental features and customer requests. This is often the case even when planning the Next Generation magical market leading product. We will become focused on meeting our product and time objectives and forget to understand what is going on outside our company.

To be fair, not all disruptive technologies will stop an industry in its tracks, but, by definition they will substantially change the way we could or should do business. If we spot them early enough they could be a substantial differentiator in our favour; on the other hand if we spot them too late .....

So one of the key tasks for any successful PM is to dedicate part of their working time to reading around – focus on your own industry (your customers and competitors) and segment but also look around you at other areas what's happening in other industries and let your imagination run wild about the possible impacts and changes.


Of course expecting the unexpected is hard and predicting the unpredictable is much harder than that – but we need to do so. It is hard to conduct a strategic product review or to make intelligent product decisions without understanding the bigger picture and looking at the potential impact of disruptive technologies.


In the next blog we will look at ways of finding the information that we need, the dangers of trying to figure out the timing and how to promote discussion within the organisation. We will also discuss some formal methodologies that we developed to analyse the impact of these technologies on our business.