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It’s really difficult to forecast the impact of disruptive technologies or servi

ID: 415228 • Letter: I

Question

It’s really difficult to forecast the impact of disruptive technologies or services. They’re the technologies or services that no one saw coming, and are complete game changers.

Online education is a disruptive technology. It's interesting to see how online education is disrupting top tier universities. Online education makes it possible for many more people to earn their degree.

Even online education is threatened by disruptive services such as free education by sites like https://www.edx.org/ and https://www.coursera.org/

What are some other market disruptions you have observed? Are market disruptions something strategic management and strategic planning methodologies can predict and capitalize on?

Explanation / Answer

The first example of market disruption can be taken from the invention of Apple play station. It was one of its kind product that was unrivalled for some time. Later on Sony tried to catch it, but could not match the quality and exclusiveness of the Apple Play station. The second example is the introduction of smartphones that reduced the market of feature phone and Symbian based mobile phones and put them out of the market. Pager also suffered the similar fate after the introduction of mobile phones and its scalability. The third example can be taken up from the introduction of personal computer to reduce the market of typewriters. These are the cases where the one technology eliminated or reduced the market of another technology, an illustration of disruptive technology.
Organizations always spend upon the research & development activities as a part of strategy to come up with either new or incremental innovation to build competitive advantage. All the organizations want to come up with disruptive technologies as an output from R&D function, but only few of them succeed. So, these organizations always want to come up with disruptive technology that can give competitive advantage over the competitors.