Innovation velocity.

in technology •  9 months ago 

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Innovation has a certain velocity, and so does productization - bringing products to market. Generally, innovation takes longer than productization, so companies take a while to design a product, then ship it for a while while working on the next version.

But accelerating change means that this will eventually flip. Productization has external dependencies and bureaucratic steps. Eventually, products will be designed much faster than they can be shipped. What happens when it takes a day to design a product but weeks or months to get it to customers?

This is technological overhang: the technology leaps ahead of the ability of downstream dependencies to process it. Overhang creates pressure for a paradigm shift. If you're still driving a Ford Model T, while a Tesla is available for a tenth of the cost, but behind regulatory barriers, you will break the legacy structures to obtain it. What will the paradigm shift look like? A culture of printing products at home will develop, some people will move to less constrained jurisdictions, some regulatory regimes will be de-facto ignored or de-emphasized, and centers of integrated unconstrained innovation will form. The overhang must collapse, but the destruction/chaos in the process is unknown. I doubt that Fortune 100 companies will navigate it smoothly, but it's certainly possible.

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