Mnemotrix Systems, Inc. has been involved in innovative technology for three decades. Often innovation means disruption of a pattern that has long been in place, and so is not desirous of change, even though that change may bring a better outcome over the long haul. As we move into the next millenium, we have continued to seek out stellar disruptive technologies that change the paradigm of life as we know it, and seek a harmonious placing, with all that this entails.

How Can Stellar Technology be Disruptive?

New technologies emerge in a far shorter time span than ever before in the history of mankind. While many of these technologies are incremental improvements over what is already available, others completely break from the pattern and redefine entire industries, change our mode of thinking about something, or just introduce new concepts to our knowledge bank.

In his 1997 best-selling book, "The Innovator's Dilemma," Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen segregates new technology into two categories: sustaining and disruptive. While sustaining technology relies on incremental improvements to an already established technology, Disruptive Technologies are new, and unexpectedly displace established technology.

By its very nature, a Disruptive Technology initially lack refinement, has early performance problems because it is new, but improves exponentially as time goes on as the initial innovators plug away at it, appeals to a rather limited audience and consumer group at first, and then as the technology matures the base grows with sophistication. Early on in the life cycle of the innovation it may be hard to gain peer support of the Disruptive Technology or a proven practical application or follow-up innovation, but the barrier disappears in time as the technology gains ground.

Establishing Marketability

While "marketability" of new technologies depends on a number of factors, Disruptive Technologies have a larger role to play in our life. For instance, a Disruptive Technology like the Internet or the "World-Wide-Web" introduced a whole new way of linking information assets together and generating commerce through global advertising schemes; gradual improvements of the first prototypes of the "Web" led to much increased public usage as we know it today.

Similarly, outgrowth technologies like the basic "Search Engine" came about in response to a need to find information in the growing environment. And it isn't reallyYahoo or Google that started the wave. It was a search algorithm called Archie, and the Gopher-enabled Veronica and Jughead, which were the precursors to what we see now as "search engines". And there are newer more dynamic engines which represent the next generation of Disruptive Technologies; such as COGNISET from Mnemotrix Systems, Inc., and application processing environments such as SMOOTHSLICE that take up the new dimensions needed by select and sophisticated consumers.

Existing businesses are often reluctant to take advantage of Disruptive Technologies, since it would involve competing with their existing technological approach.

Nonetheless, Disruptive Technologies enable us to think in dimensions we didn't think of, and in that lies their utility and power. These help us expand our knowledge base as a society and as individuals and solve problems we didn't quite know as problems. The trouble is, it's difficult to segregate a Disruptive technology from chaos that surrounds research, from all the hyperbole that accompanies every new product or technology launch announcement. There is no mantra that can enable you to distinguish between a Disruptive Technology that can alter the landscape and marketing fluff most organizations indulge in. The only true test is time, the only testbed the entire mass of users on the Internet. And yet, we hardly have any other alternative to technology solving so many of our challenges today. There could be millions of other examples where Disruptive Technologies are not only desirable, but also the only answer.

Conquering the Perception of Threat

Disruptive Technologies are particularly threatening to the leaders of an existing market, because they are competition coming from an unexpected direction. A disruptive technology can come to dominate an existing market by either filling a role in a new market that the older technology could not fill or by successively moving up-market through performance improvements until finally displacing the market incumbents to delimit a new long tail.

Disruptive Technologies emerge from the chaos that surrounds us and the best thing we can do is to create an environment which stimulates these technologies to come to the fore. We, including our leaders in business and society at large, have to be tolerant of chaos and build strategic capability to solve problems of the future rather than concentrating on today: an innovation that creates a new market by allowing customers to solve a problem in a radically new way. An innovation that improves a product in an existing market in ways that customers are expecting.

Surpassing Expectations

Disruptive Technologies result in innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically by being lower priced or designed for a different set of consumers.

We owe it to ourselves, and to our future generations, to let Disruptive Technologies gain acceptance. There may be little we can do as individuals, besides being patient with technologists and researchers as they create the next big thing, but collectively, we can create an environment that lets disruption become the norm.

We should move into the future with the confidence that the next "disruption" - whatever that is, whenever it comes on, wherever it happens will be beneficial in some way and courageously look forward to evolutionary change that will follow.