Technology can be an enabler
Many individuals mistakenly believe that it is technology which drives innovation. Yet from the definitions above, that is obviously not the case. It's opportunity which defines innovation and technology which enables innovation. Consider the classic "Build a better mousetrap" example taught generally in most business schools. You might have the technology to construct a better mousetrap, but when you yourself have no mice or the old mousetrap is useful, there's no opportunity and then a technology to construct a better one becomes irrelevant. On one other hand, if you are overrun with mice then a opportunity exists to innovate something utilizing your technology.
Another example, one with which I'm intimately familiar, are consumer electronics startup companies. I've been associated with both those who succeeded and those who failed. Each possessed unique leading edge technologies. The difference was opportunity. Those that failed could not find the opportunity to develop a meaningful innovation employing their technology. In fact to survive, these companies had to morph oftentimes into something many different and if these were lucky they might make the most of derivatives of the original technology. http://yourtechcrunch.com/ More regularly than not, the original technology wound up in the scrap heap. Technology, thus, can be an enabler whose ultimate value proposition is to create improvements to the lives. To be able to be relevant, it needs to be properly used to generate innovations which can be driven by opportunity.
Technology as a competitive advantage?
Many companies list a technology together of the competitive advantages. Is this valid? Sometimes yes, but In most cases no.
Technology develops along two paths - an evolutionary path and a revolutionary path.
A revolutionary technology is the one that enables new industries or enables answers to problems that have been previously not possible. Semiconductor technology is an excellent example. Not merely did it spawn new industries and products, nonetheless it spawned other revolutionary technologies - transistor technology, integrated circuit technology, microprocessor technology. All which provide lots 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. Plenty of microprocessor companies out there. How about quad core microprocessor technology? Not as much companies, but you've Intel, AMD, ARM, and a bunch of companies building custom quad core processors (Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm, etc). So again, little of a competitive advantage. Competition from competing technologies and easy access to IP mitigates the perceived competitive advantage of any particular technology. Android vs iOS is an excellent example of how this works. Both operating systems are derivatives of UNIX. Apple used their technology to introduce iOS and gained an earlier market advantage. However, Google, utilizing their variant of Unix (a competing technology), swept up relatively quickly. The reasons with this lie not in the underlying technology, however in how these products made possible by those technologies were brought to promote (free vs. walled garden, etc.) and the differences in the strategic visions of each company.https://arstechnician.com/
Evolutionary technology is the one that incrementally builds upon the beds base revolutionary technology. But by it's very nature, the incremental change now is easier for a competitor to complement or leapfrog. Take for example wireless cellphone technology. Company V introduced 4G products ahead of Company A and while it might experienced a brief term advantage, the moment Company A introduced their 4G products, the advantage because of technology disappeared. The customer returned to choosing Company A or Company V based on price, service, coverage, whatever, however not based on technology. Thus technology might have been relevant in the short term, however in the future, became irrelevant.https://techwaa.com/
In today's world, technologies have a tendency to ver quickly become commoditized, and within any particular technology lies the seeds of a unique death.
Technology's Relevance
This short article was written from the prospective of a conclusion customer. From the developer/designer standpoint things get murkier. The further one is removed from the technology, the less relevant it becomes. To a developer, the technology will look like a product. An enabling product, but something nonetheless, and thus it's highly relevant. Bose runs on the proprietary signal processing technology allow products that meet a couple of market requirements and thus the technology and what it enables is relevant to them. https://techsitting.com/ Their clients are more concerned with how it sounds, what's the cost, what's the standard, etc., and not so much with how it's achieved, thus the technology used is a lot less relevant to them.
