Innovations Are Coming Faster - But Can We Predict Disruptive Technology Time Tables

For good or not innovation and disruption will occur anytime human begin thinking, creating and cross-pollinating to solve problems - and that, at least to me is a given. We often read somewhere that the rate of change, and disruption is coming in at a faster pace than ever before, but are those claims true? I'd like to briefly discuss this with you if I might.You see, there was an interesting article in Wired Magazine - November of 2013 titled; "Is Innovation Predictable?" by Abhijan Rej which stated;"There are four major arguments that are made by Arthur in TNT that are directly relevant in answering our Gorilla-in-the-Room question: (1) Technologies have a recursive structure, (2) there is a generative grammar for each technology, (3) technologies group together as domains, and finally, (4) there are ecological mechanisms for selection of one technology over the other and a given technology might be mode-locked into a path of further and further demand and eventually arise as the 'victor' in the ecology of technologies."Okay, that is one way to see it, but there are many more bits of wisdom to this, from Kurzweil's tracking of Moore's Law in the technology sectors - to a theory of mine I'd like to share with you.You see, for the last 3.5 decades I've subscribed to as many Trade Journals in as many industries as I could get my hands on. At one time I can remember subscribing to something like 76 magazines. As the Internet got popular fewer were published, but I certainly learned a lot. It seemed like every industry had at least 2 to 3 major disrupting innovations per decade, often bunched together, usually the product of a non-industry entrant and a new company not entrenched in the industry association.


Now then, I do believe that innovation is predictable and you can usually tell about when it will happen, and mind you, I am basing my finding by observations in tracking so many industries and being involved in them as a service company to industry. In the end there is one thing that is true, innovation is best predictable by those engaged in some part of the innovative supply chain - from Science Fiction thinker to engineer, and from inventor to entrepreneur - to industry R&D departments of sector main-stay multi-national conglomerate incumbents and government lobbyist greasing the skids for the next new thing to plow into our lives - like it or not. Okay so, I'd like you to consider all this and think on it from a philosophical perspective.Take a gander at the article I cited above and let me know what you think. You can reach me by email.