Technology can be an enabler
Many people mistakenly still find it technology which drives innovation. Yet from the definitions above, that is actually not the case. It's opportunity which defines innovation and technology which enables innovation. Consider the classic "Build a much better mousetrap" example taught generally in most business schools. You might have the technology to create a much better mousetrap, but when you yourself have no mice or the old mousetrap is useful, there is no opportunity and then a technology to create a much better one becomes irrelevant. On the other hand, if you are overrun with mice then a opportunity exists to innovate an item utilizing your technology.
Another example, one with which I am intimately familiar, are gadgets startup companies. I've been associated with both the ones that succeeded and the ones that failed. Each possessed unique leading edge technologies. The difference was opportunity. Those who failed could not find the chance to develop a meaningful innovation employing their technology. In fact to survive, these companies had to morph oftentimes into something completely different and if they were lucky they may take advantage of derivatives of the original technology. http://yourtechcrunch.com/ More often than not, the initial technology wound up in the scrap heap. Technology, thus, can be an enabler whose ultimate value proposition is to produce improvements to our lives. In order to be relevant, it needs to be used to generate innovations which can be driven by opportunity.
Technology as a competitive advantage?
Many companies list a technology as you of the competitive advantages. Is this valid? Sometimes yes, but In most cases no.
Technology develops along two paths - an evolutionary path and a revolutionary path.
A revolutionary technology is the one which enables new industries or enables solutions to problems that were previously not possible. Semiconductor technology is a good example. Not only achieved it spawn new industries and products, however it spawned other revolutionary technologies - transistor technology, integrated circuit technology, microprocessor technology. All which provide most of the products and services we consume today. But is semiconductor technology a competitive advantage? Looking at the amount of semiconductor companies that exist today (with new ones forming every day), I'd say not. Think about microprocessor technology? Again, no. Plenty of microprocessor companies out there. Think about quad core microprocessor technology? Not as many companies, but you've Intel, AMD, ARM, and a bunch of companies building custom quad core processors (Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm, etc). So again, very little of a competitive advantage. Competition from competing technologies and comfortable access to IP mitigates the perceived competitive benefit of any particular technology. Android vs iOS is a good exemplory case of how this works. Both systems are derivatives of UNIX. Apple used their technology to introduce iOS and gained an earlier market advantage. However, Google, utilizing their variant of Unix (a competing technology), trapped relatively quickly. The causes for this lie not in the underlying technology, but in how these products made possible by those technologies were brought to advertise (free vs. walled garden, etc.) and the differences in the strategic visions of every company.https://arstechnician.com/
Evolutionary technology is the one which incrementally builds upon the bottom revolutionary technology. But by it's very nature, the incremental change is simpler for a competitor to complement or leapfrog. Take like wireless cellphone technology. Company V introduced 4G products just before Company A and while it could have had a quick term advantage, when Company A introduced their 4G products, the bonus as a result of technology disappeared. The consumer went back to choosing Company A or Company V based on price, service, coverage, whatever, however, not based on technology. Thus technology may have been relevant in the short-term, but in the long term, became irrelevant.https://techwaa.com/
In today's world, technologies tend to ver quickly become commoditized, and within any particular technology lies the seeds of its death.
Technology's Relevance
This informative article was written from the prospective of an end customer. From a developer/designer standpoint things get murkier. The further one is taken off the technology, the less relevant it becomes. To a developer, the technology will look like a product. An enabling product, but an item nonetheless, and thus it's highly relevant. Bose works on the proprietary signal processing technology to enable products that meet a couple of market requirements and thus the technology and what it enables is highly relevant to them. https://techsitting.com/ Their customers are more concerned with how it sounds, what's the purchase price, what's the quality, etc., and not really much with how it's achieved, thus the technology used is significantly less highly relevant to them.
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