Disruptive Innovation!

Folks,

I had the pleasure of attending the "hiTech Competition" kickoff event a couple of days ago. hiTech is a software product competition organized by the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Irvine along with a few corporate partners. Find more information here.

The guest speaker at this event was Adam Mosam. He is a young entrepreneur who recently moved to Orange County from Toronto, Canada. He sold his first company here and as a true entrepreneur is thinking of a new venture, whilst working at the company that bought his first venture. Adam's story is very similar to stories of other entrepreneurs who start immediately out of school and struggle to the very core before reaping all the fruit. Among a lot of interesting things that Adam said I clearly recollect the phrase "Disruptive Innovation".

So I came home and thought about it. What is "Disruptive Innovation"? I guess in simple words it is something that challenges the dominating strategy in a particular market and completely changes the game by doing things differently using a new business model supported by a solid technological infrastructure advances. It is disruptive since all the "set up" businesses are at a risk of being challenged by some product and model that is better than theirs.

I wondered that, given the pace at which we see new technology thrown into the markets in all areas, how long will it be before the total landscape of the society changes? Right from the basic chores of shopping, communication, logging activities(photos, videos, journals) that every person performs to the way businesses operate and various disciplines merge. Everything is undergoing disruptive innovation as I see it. And what I also see in it is an opportunity. It is in application of technology to various fields like manufacturing, medicine, space etc that we can create new ways of doing things that were not possible before.

Exciting times lie ahead. Grab your seats for a fun ride is all I can say now. Don't have much vision or experience to predict things, but I can be sure that the things to come will be really really exciting and mind blogging!