Disruption: Eight areas that will turn your industry on its head

If you want to understand what waves may be coming to your company and your industry, it is imperative that you operate a technology radar. In other words, you need to be able to observe closely and assess the situation. There's even a saying in Silicon Valley for this. It's "Which Technology or Business Model is going from deceptive to disruptive." There are eight areas that are turning your industry upside down, that are currently undergoing major upheaval, and where development is progressing very exponentially:

1. Communication and networks
2. Energy
3. Fight against diseases and cancer
4. Stem cells and longevity
5. Transportation
6. Robotics and Workforce
7. Materials, production and 3D printing
8. Computation and artificial intelligence

Ask questions

The following examples show how difficult it is, however, to make the right decisions from such exponential questions that are currently being asked. An important basic prerequisite for this is to ask the right questions. These include: What does it mean for my company if

• suddenly billions of additional people have access to the Internet?
• Everyone has the opportunity to continue their education online?
• Transportation costs can be reduced enormously by autonomous cars and trucks as well as drones?
• The transport of energy becomes less important than the storage of energy?
• diseases like cancer can suddenly be successfully fought?
• Artificial intelligence can make better diagnoses than doctors?
• people can live to be 100 or 150 years old?
• Robots and 3D printing make the manufacturing process a commodity?
• Can organic cells be combined with technology?
• Artificial intelligence becoming omnipresent in everyday life, for example to read lips or diagnose?
• When the simple daily tasks in the office are taken over by machine learning

Two variants are available

If you want to make your company competitive in the face of these challenges of our time, you can basically choose between two variants: First, you can reduce costs compared to your competitors, thereby producing more cheaply and offering correspondingly lower prices. Or secondly, you can increase the benefits of your products and services for customers and thus increase both your sales and your margin.

But no matter which variant you choose, in any case IT plays an extremely important role. Companies that operate successfully in their respective markets today have long since recognized that they must not view IT as a mere cost factor. In fact, IT is in many cases a business enabler or even a business catalyst. However, the approach is usually more straightforward and obvious when it comes to reducing costs. If IT is used as an enabler, significant savings can be achieved in the area of both process optimization and process automation. In addition to "electrification," the area of process optimization also includes "digitization," namely the complete conversion of the previous analog process flows so that they can be completely redesigned and made more efficient in the overall context.

Learning from start-ups when it comes to disruption

If, on the other hand, the aim is to increase the benefits for customers, the optimal approach is no longer so obvious. This is why this area in particular is considered the absolute supreme discipline in dealing with new business models and technologies. For this reason, improving customer value is appropriately feared by large corporations. The main reason for this fact is that, thanks to the democratization in IT and technology that has already been taking place to an increasing extent for years, small start-up companies can act much more agilely on the markets and bring "improved customer value" to the market much faster than is the case with large corporations - not least because of the structures established there and the fear of their own cannibalization. Because these processes are exponential in most cases, it is much more difficult for market participants and analysts to make accurate predictions.

I invite you to dive a little deeper into the matter! Since my research would blow up this blog, I have for those interested a small Whitepaper compiled with many examples and sources from these 8 exponential areas. Be surprised with many practical examples and learn which technologies are already very advanced and where currently investors have their focus.