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E-agility

Bill French, Information Age

18/06/2003 16:42:17

Last weekend I attended the first day of a small entrepreneurial conference - EntConnect - and one attendee challenged the notion of "disruptive technology". His comments indicated that he didn't really buy the idea that disruptive models played a significant role in business economies. I'm not an economist, but I've read a few books on the subject - most notably one by Clayton Christensen ("Innovator's Dilemma") - who claims that disruption not only exists, but ignoring it is perilous to any company.

His theory is that organisations customarily develop mind sets and processes that revolve around doing what they already know. Once that pattern becomes established, managers have great difficulty justifying to others or even themselves the need to turn their processes upside down to respond to a barely emergent market change. By the time the threat is apparent, however, it's usually too late; upstart companies have seized a substantial lead.

As an experiment, I decided to demonstrate disruption by creating and launching a new product line while sitting in the audience of the EntConnect conference. Ironically, as I fired up my Pentium4 notebook (arguably a disruptive technology at one time) which instantly recognised the presence of an 802.11 wireless network in the conference hall - I realised that many changes have occurred in the last 24 months that now make it possible for me to provide such a demonstration of "e-agility".

Before the presenter of the session I was attending finished her introduction slides, I launched a new line of clothing and promotional products for attendees of the conference. You can find this product line at: www.cafeshops.com/entconnectAlthough CafePress is a very interesting (and certainly disruptive) idea, it's not the complete story. The nature of this model begins to touch on economic principles at a very deep level. We now possess agile business and economic systems that enable "unintended consequences".

As a technologically-based society, we're on the threshold of some very important changes that impact our business and social fabric. Dramatic shifts in the way we do things are beginning to occur in many segments implying that mass audiences can be as small as one. Linking customers through the virtual space of the Internet to physical has always been the objective of e-commerce. However, it is the alchemy of digital content through automated business process and physical manufacturing that will disrupt existing markets, leading to rapid adoption of new business definitions.

"I now inform you that you are too far from reality."

This is one of the quotes recently gleaned from a press conference with the Iraqi Information Minister, Saeed al-Sahaf who is affectionately named by US and Australian forces as "Baghdad Bob". This is a wonderful quote, and not surprisingly, you can buy it on a T-shirt or a coffee cup www.cafeshops.com/welovemss).

Advice: take a close look at your business environment and try to imagine how it might be completely overturned.

Bill French is co-founder, MyST Technology Partners