Disrupting my notions

Disruptive Technologies was fascinating today. Professor Utterback traced back over the history of light bulbs and made many salient points along the way.

A student had asked about "first mover advantage" in the previous class. He promised to address it later and did so at the beginning of class today. There are a couple of papers he spoke about (I don't have the references on hand) that covered the issue in some detail. The net result after looking at the "first mover advantage" for more than 10 years is that if anything, first mover advantage ends up being a slight disadvantage in aggregate. I look forward to reading the papers.

Another point Utterback made concerns the fact that large companies have consistently shown to create significant advances in technology when challenged by a competitor, but can only improve 3-5% when not challenged. What does that say about what people are doing at large companies that aren't facing direct technological competition? It furthers my suspicion that large companies are filled with inefficient workers that add little to the bottom line. I estimate that in companies with tens of thousands of employees that you could cut 10% easy and potentially more of the workforce with little impact to the bottom line or the long-term results of the company. I don't have empirical data, it is just a guestimate based on all the inefficiencies I've seen in big companies. But I digress…

Lastly, Utterback pointed out that companies tend to focus on improving only their own technologies as opposed to trying new technologies and improving them. For example, when Edison was making advances with electric-based lighting, the gas companies were scrambling to figure out how to make lighting efficient with gas. Companies would rather eek out performance in a long-standing technology than get ahead of the performance curve by adopting a new, promising technology.

Interesting stuff.