Courses/Ingenuity 601/Innolution/Disruptive Technologies

One book that I've really enjoyed about the impact of disruptive innovations is "The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen of Harvard Business School ( http://www.businessweek.com/chapter/christensen.htm).

Essentially, this book argues that companies (such as the Hard Drive industry) are exceedingly good at listening to their customer base and sustaining innovations in their products to meet their client's needs. Disruptive technologies (e.g. smaller hard drives, solid state disks) are usually first developed and marketed by large corporations. However, these technologies usually do not meet the needs of existing clients (e.g. too small size, too expensive, too slow) thus these projects are shelved until the technology becomes more viable in the marketplace.

On the flipside, startup companies focus on niche markets (e.g. laptops, mp3 players) and ignore the needs prized by current vendors. Often the rate of improvement of these technologies greatly exceeds the demand by their niche market. This happens until the technology improves to a point that it can compete with the sustaining technologies of the large corporate vendors (e.g. 3.5" disk drives).

So, in this book you have the conflicts inherent in an interdisciplinary team. Engineers develop incredible new disruptive technologies that could change the face of competition in this area within a few years. While marketers are directly involved with customers and know about their sustaining needs. Thus a corporate board is faced with the decision: do we support known needs of our customers in future products, or do we explore untapped markets and products from engineers. Sadly, the typical response is to follow the lead of marketers. This is the whole argument of Dr. Christensen's book.

More discussion of this topic and how it applies to tabletop technology can be found here: http://paradynexus.blogspot.com/2007/08/digital-tables-as-disruptive-technology.html

From personal experience, I know a number of people at Smart Technologies who have introduced innovative technologies in the Calgary area. For example, Dr. Gerald Morrison developed a camera based touch technology for a digital whiteboard that is now part of their main product line. More recently, Michael Boyle introduced an electronic voting system for classrooms.