David Deeds, entrepreneurship professor at the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business, recently co-authored an article on making better strategic decisions around slow-developing technology in the Harvard Business Review.
From the article:
Most corporations can’t afford to invest much effort in tracking technologies that may take decades to be effective and affordable enough to commercialize. At the same time, when the right group of technologies reaches the right maturity and cost, they can be extremely disruptive – and because they often blindside companies, their impact can be devastating.
One example of that has been playing out in front of us: the internet. The academic version went online in 1969, but it took more than two decades (and the invention of internet protocols, HTML, the web browser, and eventually, broadband access) to power the dot-com boom and countless innovations in the decades since. It’s an innovation that’s disrupted entire industries, and companies that struggled to figure out the right time to invest in an internet strategy often didn’t survive.
Determining when to place bets on emergent technologies is a science, not an art. The most fundamental thing a CEO should do is stop thinking about innovation through singular technologies. Although many executives don’t realize it, the innovations that create new industries and ecosystems – or shake up existing ones – are often made up of multiple technologies. Instead, they should identify the various sciences and technologies that underlie a potential innovation and establish a process for monitoring and managing them as they develop – even if that may take decades.
