Technology is an enabler
Lots of people mistakenly believe that it is technology which drives innovation. Yet from the definitions above, that is actually not the case. It is opportunity which defines innovation and technology which enables innovation. Consider the classic "Build an improved mousetrap" example taught generally in most business schools. You may have the technology to construct an improved mousetrap, but when you have no mice or the old mousetrap is effective, there is no opportunity and then your technology to construct an improved one becomes irrelevant. On one other hand, if you're overrun with mice then your opportunity exists to innovate an item using your technology.
Another example, one with which I'm intimately familiar, are gadgets startup companies. I've been connected with both the ones that succeeded and the ones that failed. Each possessed unique leading edge technologies. The difference was opportunity. Those that failed couldn't find the chance to produce a meaningful innovation using their technology. In fact to survive, these companies had to morph oftentimes into something totally different and if they certainly were lucky they could make the most of derivatives of their original technology. http://yourtechcrunch.com/ More often than not, the initial technology wound up in the scrap heap. Technology, thus, is an enabler whose ultimate value proposition is to produce improvements to the lives. In order to be relevant, it needs to be properly used to produce innovations that are driven by opportunity.
Technology as a competitive advantage?
Many companies list a technology as one of their competitive advantages. Is this valid? In some cases yes, but Generally no.
Technology develops along two paths - an evolutionary path and a revolutionary path.
A revolutionary technology is the one which enables new industries or enables methods to problems that were previously not possible. Semiconductor technology is a great example. Not only achieved it spawn new industries and products, however it spawned other revolutionary technologies - transistor technology, integrated circuit technology, microprocessor technology. All which provide many of the products and services we consume today. But is semiconductor technology a competitive advantage? Looking at the amount of semiconductor companies that exist today (with new ones forming every day), I'd say not. How about microprocessor technology? Again, no. Lots of microprocessor companies out there. How about quad core microprocessor technology? Not as many companies, but you've Intel, AMD, ARM, and a number of companies building custom quad core processors (Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm, etc). So again, not much of a competitive advantage. Competition from competing technologies and quick access to IP mitigates the perceived competitive advantageous asset of any particular technology. Android vs iOS is a great example of how this works. Both os's are derivatives of UNIX. Apple used their technology to introduce iOS and gained an early on market advantage. However, Google, utilizing their variant of Unix (a competing technology), trapped relatively quickly. The reasons with this lie not in the underlying technology, but in how the products made possible by those technologies were brought to promote (free vs. walled garden, etc.) and the differences in the strategic visions of each company.https://arstechnician.com/
Evolutionary technology is the one which incrementally builds upon the bottom revolutionary technology. But by it's very nature, the incremental change is easier for a competitor to match or leapfrog. Take for example wireless cellphone technology. Company V introduced 4G products just before Company A and while it might have experienced a brief term advantage, the moment Company A introduced their 4G products, the benefit due to technology disappeared. The customer went back to choosing Company A or Company V predicated on price, service, coverage, whatever, but not predicated on technology. Thus technology might have been relevant in the short term, but in the long term, became irrelevant.https://techwaa.com/
In today's world, technologies tend to quickly become commoditized, and within any particular technology lies the seeds of a unique death.
Technology's Relevance
This short article was written from the prospective of an end customer. From a developer/designer standpoint things get murkier. The further one is removed from the technology, the less relevant it becomes. To a developer, the technology will look such as a product. An enabling product, but an item nonetheless, and thus it's highly relevant. Bose runs on the proprietary signal processing technology allow products that meet a set of market requirements and thus the technology and what it enables is highly relevant to them. https://techsitting.com/ Their clients are more focused on how it sounds, what's the price, what's the product quality, etc., and not really much with how it's achieved, thus the technology used is a lot less highly relevant to them.
