The article “Right tech, wrong time: How to make sure your ecosystem is ready for the newest technologies” written by Ron Adner and Rahul Kapoor published in Harvard Business Review in November 2016 was a very interesting read. For decades, society and many organisations are facing “creative destruction’ and transformative threats which are caused by the development/innovation in technology such as internet of things, cloud computing etc.. There is a concern about “Right tech, wrong time” situation/syndrome that raises a question “are we ready or not?” when we are not fully equipped to face/embrace the technology transformation and to predict the best time to implement changes/innovation.

Adner and Kapoor (2016) explained that some new technology can replace their predecessor quickly when the old technology is stagnant, the new ones has overcome their emergence challenges and established its position within the existing and the old technology is able to maintain its relevance. Occasionally, it takes time for the support network in an ecosystem to mature and develop,  as an example, barcode technology that has not been changed in decades but the IT utilities have improved over the years. On the other hand, some new technologies or starts-ups experience  slow progress as they face the bottlenecks in their ecosystem which provides support. This bottleneck situation can be a process of perfecting the new technology itself or other support system issues that need to be resolved. As an example, there are broadband and online security issues needing to be addressed in the cloud-based applications and storage, it’s not just as simple as storing and managing data in the remote storage system/server.

According to Adner and Kapoor (2016), many organisations/innovating firms need to plan for success by choosing better timing to implement new technology/innovation with consideration of the competition from the rival technologies, the readiness of the new ecosystem, improvement/potential of the old technology. They also need to think about the possible scenarios such as:

• Creative destruction: the new technology face a low emergence challenge in the existing ecosystem and old technology cannot compete.
• Robust resilience: the new technology faces a serious emergence challenge in the existing ecosystem and the old technology has a strong potential to improve.
• Robust coexistence: the new technology faces a low emergence challenge in the existing ecosystem and old technology has a strong potential to improve.
• Illusion of resilience: the new technology/innovation needs to be perfected or requires significant improvements and the old technology cannot be improved much.

 

Adner, R., & Kapoor, R. (2016). Right tech, wrong time: How to make sure your ecosystem is ready for the newest technologies. Harvard Business Review, 94(11), 60-67.