Business model innovation: How exponential technologies can be disruptive in your industry

Business model innovation: How exponential technologies can be disruptive in your industry

5 years ago
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https://medium.com/swlh/business-model-innovation-how-exponential-technologies-can-be-disruptive-in-your-industry-6ee51c2036ce

Every day we open the newspapers and read about exciting new, exponential technologies that have the potential to “disrupt” an industry. Artificial intelligence, 3D printing, “artificial” meat, autonomous cars, robotics, virtual and augmented reality, nanotechnology, and on and on. However, the excitement usually wanes quickly after the huge challenges to adapt those technologies to create real and concrete products and services are exposed. This includes the mammoth task of convincing customers to abandon their traditional solutions, and embrace a new value proposition that can be scaled up and become mainstream. It seems that we are amazed by the technological advancements, but we “cannot get them to work for us yet”. The missing piece in this puzzle is business model innovation. New technologies are a transforming force and a necessary condition to disrupt an industry, but it is business model innovation that is the enabling factor which allows the technological revolution to become the new reality. In this article we provide some insights to the power of business model innovation in an industry, that is always evolving and on the cusp of new scientific discoveries: Healthcare. Our conclusions however are not singularly applicable to healthcare. We believe they could be applied to any industry, and this will be explored in future articles.

First, let’s look beyond the buzz phrase “exponential technology” to understand what the phrase means. Arguably there are two components: on one side, “exponential”, meaning something that is rapidly accelerating, say doubling in size or alternatively halving in costs. Exponential technologies include artificial intelligence (AI), augmented and virtual reality (AR, VR), data science, digital biology and biotechnology, digital medicine, nanotechnology and digital fabrication, networks and computing systems, robotics, and autonomous vehicles. On the other side, it is a technology that is now at the point where its price-performance makes it possible to be incorporated into solving today’s problems in ways that were not previously possible.