What is the Importance of Technology?

 

Technology can be an enabler

Lots of people mistakenly believe that it is 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. Think of the classic "Build a much better mousetrap" example taught generally in most business schools. You may have the technology to construct a much better mousetrap, but if you have no mice or the old mousetrap is effective, there's no opportunity and then the technology to construct a much better one becomes irrelevant. On one other hand, if you are overrun with mice then the opportunity exists to innovate an item utilizing your technology.

Another example, one with which I'm intimately familiar, are consumer electronics startup companies. I've been connected with both the ones that succeeded and the ones that failed. Each possessed unique leading edge technologies. The difference was opportunity. Those that failed could not find the opportunity to produce a meaningful innovation employing their technology. In fact to survive, these companies had to morph oftentimes into something totally different and if they were lucky they may take advantage of derivatives of these 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 the lives. To be able to be relevant, it needs to be properly used to generate innovations that are driven by opportunity.

Technology as a competitive advantage?

Many companies list a technology as one of these competitive advantages. Is this valid? Sometimes yes, but Generally 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 answers to problems that have been previously not possible. Semiconductor technology is an excellent example. Not only did it spawn new industries and products, nonetheless 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? Taking a look at the amount of semiconductor companies that exist today (with new ones forming every day), I'd say not. How about microprocessor technology? Again, no. Lots of microprocessor companies out there. How about quad core microprocessor technology? Not as numerous companies, but you have Intel, AMD, ARM, and a number of companies building custom quad core processors (Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm, etc). So again, very little of a competitive advantage. Competition from competing technologies and quick access to IP mitigates the perceived competitive advantage of any particular technology. Android vs iOS is an excellent exemplory case of how this works. Both operating systems are derivatives of UNIX. Apple used their technology to introduce iOS and gained an early market advantage. However, Google, utilizing their variant of Unix (a competing technology), caught up relatively quickly. The reasons with this lie not in the underlying technology, but in how the merchandise made possible by those technologies were brought to advertise (free vs. walled garden, etc.) and the differences in the strategic visions of each 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 fit or leapfrog. Take for example wireless cellphone technology. Company V introduced 4G products ahead of Company A and while it may have experienced a short 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 future, became irrelevant.https://techwaa.com/

In today's world, technologies often swiftly 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 the 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 is highly relevant. Bose runs on the proprietary signal processing technology to enable products that meet a set of market requirements and thus the technology and what it enables is relevant to them. https://techsitting.com/ Their clients are more focused on how it sounds, what's the purchase price, what's the standard, etc., and not so much with how it is achieved, thus the technology used is a lot less relevant to them.