“When you’re the leader in a race, you can easily get taken out by competition that you’re not at all expecting.”
That’s designer and technologist John Maeda reflecting on the nature of disruptive innovation and their timescales. Whether it’s technologies with broad, sweeping applications that upend society — like what happened with the shift from steam power to electricity — to more specific inventions like the 1990s hard disk world, he offers up a meditation “when thinking about being disrupted.” In addition to citing the late Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, he unearths the source paper behind a conference talk he attended in the Before Times called, “Dynamo and the Computer: The Productivity Paradox” by Stanford economist Paul David, published back in 1990. What’s critical, Maeda argues, is “keep[ing] an eye on the competition right in front of you (even if you underestimate it or don’t see it at all), as well as the newest thing that’s coming to take you out of the game.”
