How the next generation will disrupt technology
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Hyperconnectivity
There can be little innovation without technology, if any at all. The ICT (information and communications technology) industry started with room-sized computers for governments and corporations, and evolved to producing small gadgets for consumers in only four decades. How did huge computers get packed up in our pockets? Moore’s law predicted a technological evolution pattern that sums up this development. Transistors on a chip scaled down and multiplied, driving the computing power to double every year, while the size of devices actually decreased.
While other industries experience a climactic change then plateau in terms of innovation, ICT keeps advancing at a fast pace, accelerating its rate of change. As technology accelerates in performance, it also brings innovation to every aspect of our lives – and it is a disruptive innovation. The capability of the latest technology rapidly enables the development of the next improved technology, which in its turn replaces or changes the previous technological product.
As technological progress accelerates, some people may feel tired of keeping up with the latest new device. But not the young generation. Everything in the lives of our youth is somehow touched by technology, and they seem to understand very well the way technology enables and influences our businesses and our lives. They not only keep up with technology, they feed off it, they drive it, they champion it. Indeed, the disruptive innovation that displaces and replaces previous ideas, products or processes and evolves at such an exponential rate cannot be mentioned anymore without the role that the young generation plays: they are the disruptive generation.
The rate of technological change and the wave of disruptive innovation create great opportunities in the market place. From a bakery to a bank, every and any business can ride this wave of innovation and technology. And if businesses choose not to, then others will take their place.
However, disruptive innovation does not need to be developed from scratch. Collaborative innovation plays a big role in changing and evolving entire industries. For example, after we developed Kinect, a motion-sensing tool, at Microsoft, we kept the technology closed and fixed for gaming. After repeated appeals by our stakeholders to open the technology up for further innovation, we discovered that doing so would create a wave of innovation across industries.
Indeed, with Kinect’s open software kit, entire start-ups were built around using the gaming technology for various products across industries such as education and healthcare. For example, developers turned the power of the Microsoft Kinect’s computerized gesture recognition into a variety of healthcare uses from physical therapy to surgery support, from autism screening to helping the deaf communicate.
We may not really know what the next “game-changing” innovation will displace and improve, but we do know that this type of disruptive innovation is a game our youth is learning to champion. The disruptive generation is digital native and ready to innovate.
Author: Jan Muehlfeit is the Chairman of Microsoft Europe
Image: Students play with their iPads at the Steve Jobs school in Sneek August 21, 2013. REUTERS/Michael Kooren
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