Strategic thinking about disruptive technologies

Grand Strategies

Please review Strategic thinking about disruptive technologies prior to starting your analysis. Distinguish between the following pairs of grand strategies and try to use textbook examples or examples from another source.

• Horizontal and vertical integration
• Conglomerate and concentric diversification
• Product development and innovation
• Joint venture and strategic alliance

Strategic thinking about disruptive technologies Nick Evans, Bill Ralston and Andrew Broderick Nick Evans (nevans@ sric-bi.com) is the director of Explorer in SRI Consulting Business Intelligence’s Croydon, England, office. Bill Ralston (wralston@sric-bi.com) is a vice president of consulting in SRICs Menlo Park, California office. Andrew Broderick is a former senior consultant with SRIC-BI. Technology assessment Potentially disruptive technologies emerging from laboratories around the globe drive many organizations’ future opportunities and risks. To be successfully adaptive, an organization must be able to speedily identify which technologies will be significant, to analyze their potential impacts, and to understand the uncertainties of their commercialization. Making the uncertainties about the future explicit is the key to understanding the possibilities and making good choices about where and when to invest. A method for dealing with the challenge What organizations need is a systematic way to look at the full range of emerging technologies, see the commercialization possibilities, understand their uncertainties, compare the technologies, select the ones to focus on, and continually review new information and choices. As a case in point, SRIC-BI recently applied its opportunity-discovery process to a challenging problem facing the US government: Identify the most important civilian technologies that could be disruptive to US interests up to 2025.[1] Key features of the process include: B Assembling a multidisciplinary group of technology and market analysts. B Using a common language for describing and discussing emerging technologies. B Using workshops to assimilate and sort through information rapidly, generate innovative ideas, conduct comparisons, and segregate results. B Preparing decision-oriented profiles of high-potential technologies. Exhibit 1 shows a schematic of SRIC-BI’s process applied by a group of its technology analysts in California and England in a project for the US government. The process started with the effort to identify all the possibilities for disruptive technologies that could influence US interests in the next 20 years. A multidisciplinary project team of experienced technologists used wiki software (from JotSpot) to facilitate the online development of disruptive-technology ideas and capture notes on those ideas. Analysts filed technology notes on the wiki covering: DOI 10.1108/10878570910926034 B Basic description. What is the technology, how could it develop, and what would be new capabilities and benefits? B Significance. What’s different from today’s equivalent technology, and why could development be significant? VOL. 37 NO. 1 2009, pp. 23-30, Q Emerald Group Publishing Limited, ISSN 1087-8572 j STRATEGY & LEADERSHIP j PAGE 23 Exhibit 1 Process for selection of disruptive technologies B Disruption. In what aspects of the technology is it possible to anticipate consequences of the technology’s development that might be disruptive? In which applications? And under what circumstances? By using a wiki, SRIC-BI analysts were able to edit and comment collaboratively about each other’s submissions, maintaining a single up-to-date document. Next, a workshop including SRIC-BI’s analysts and its client presented the resultant 102 potentially disruptive technology wiki entries individually, with summaries of their descriptions, significance, and disruptive potential. Analysts selected 20 dominant civilian technologies and mapped them on a nine-square grid, plotting Impact (on four established elements of US national power: Geopolitical, Military, Economic, and Cultural) on one axis against Uncertainty (of absolute knowledge of technology development parameters and timing) on the other axis. The results of this mapping indicated that the 20 civilian technologies would have mostly medium to high impact on the four elements of national power. A further ranking exercise rated each technology’s likely impact on US national power according to four criteria: survival, vital, major, and peripheral: j j B Survival. If the issue resolution is not satisfactory, the nation’s survival will come into question. B Vital. If the issue resolution is not satisfactory, the nation will experience a permanent degradation in one of the elements of national power. Likewise, if the issue resolution is satisfactory, the result will be a long-term improvement in one of the elements of national power (that is, an improvement lasting more than ten years.) B Major. If the issue resolution is not satisfactory, the nation will experience a temporary but noticeable degradation in one of the elements of national power. Likewise, if the issue resolution is satisfactory, the result will be a noticeable but temporary improvement in one