Incremental vs disruption

One often wonders what causes a technology to be considered disruptive. I have spend some time thinking about technology trends and am always interested in what people each year predict what the "hot" technology will be for the next year.

In general, one sees technology trends plotted as some measure on the y-axis vs time on the x-axis. The y-axis can be money, complexity, reduction in size, number of elements, etc. You have seen these plots many times. Incremental increases in the trend line just extend the trend in the same general direction, plus or minus some deviation that accounts for the influnce of minior factors.

Disruptive technolgoy causes the trend line to show a suden change in direction of the curve, or a jump in the y-axis. Both effects cause one to reset one's expectations of where things are going. But, what causes this to happen.

I would posit that one can often resolve a disruptive technology by veiwing it as the intersection of two or more trend lines that allow one to suddently do something that couldn't be done before. The synergy gained from the joining and intersection of the two trends allows new thoughts to occure, new ideas to arise, and innovative people to immediately see the advantage that could be gained from this synergy.

So, with this as a base-line concept, what are some of the new things we see that are the result of this intersection of two or more technology trend lines? What would you suggest?

Disruption is a fact of life

The Wikipedia provides a good background on disruptive technology and what it means. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_technology. As you browse through this section of Wikipedia, you begin to see that diruptive technology is indeed a fact of life, starting from way back.

We will explore some of the newer disruptive or potentially disruptive technology in this blog and try to understand why it is considered disruptive. From time to time I also will explore how the concept of disruption also applies to other parts of our lives not necessarily related to technology. An example might be how social networking is changing the way we communicate and with whom we communicate. In other words, disruptive technology affects the way we live and interact with each other in disruptive ways. Disruption is a fact of life.