Market Insights: Exponential technologies causing disruptive innovation

Disruptive technologies

I recently attended an investment conference in San Diego and had the privilege to listen to the keynote speaker Dr. Peter Diamandis.  He is an international pioneer in the fields of innovation, incentive competitions and commercial space who was recently named one of “The World’s 50 Greatest Leaders” by Fortune Magazine.  His presentation was about exponential technologies causing disruptive innovation and the coming age of abundance.  In fact, one of his two best-selling books is called just that, Abundance.  These are technologies such as digital medicine, computational systems & embedded networks, robotics & artificial intelligence, digital manufacturing/3D printing, synthetic biology/bioinformatics and nanomaterials that are transforming what was once scarce into something abundant.  

Disruptive technology is not a new topic, but it was a breath of fresh air to hear leading insights on this from his optimistic and positive point of view.  Too often in the media we only hear the negative.  These technologies are coming and we have the opportunity to embrace them positively and guide them to bring abundance to the world.  Although I brought back a wealth of knowledge from the conference that will help guide our investment management, I can say that listening to him was one of the more fascinating couple hours I have spent in a while and it seems appropriate to discuss this in our Market Insights.  

Not only will these technologies increasingly affect companies, industries and economies, it will also greatly affect the way we live and work in the future.  Being ahead of the curve can be the difference in your own company succeeding or not.  The big message that comes from this is to empower yourself with knowledge and be willing to adapt to change early.  You will either need to disrupt your own business model or it will be disrupted by others.  These 'exponential organizations' are those whose impact (or output) is disproportionally large compared to its number of employees because of its use of networks, automation and/or its leveraging of the crowd.

We will likely come back to this topic in some future Market Insights posts, but for now we thought we would leave you with an interesting prediction(click here) from Google's Director of Engineering, who has had an uncanny ability in the past to predict future technologies.