Charting your future with technology trends.

Technology in a lot of ways is not unlike biological systems. For one, the technological marvels of today will become obsolete in the next few years. Just ask kids what a typewriter is and you'll know what I'm talking about. A lot of the have not even heard of an 8 track cassette or a vinyl record! Technology does change with time.

If technology is time dependent are we at its mercy such that we find ourselves one morning left behind? Of course not! Aside from the fact that it takes a while for people to adapt to new technology, it is also a fact that its evolution follows definite trends. In general, a technical system will continue improving towards increasing ideality. This means the quality of useful functions is improved while reducing harmful functions and cost. As an exanple remember the big clutch bag cellphones we had 20yrs ago? These later became the bowling pin phones followed by the fat shampoo bottle types. With the transition to gsm and 3g, phones became smaller and thinner. You see this similar trend with transportation, video, computing, etc.

 The danger in using technological trends is when we take it as a linear, dogmatic timeline.  I recently used an analysis of technology trends in the context of learning as part of social innovation.  When we deal with learning technologies and systems, the trend if to go from a cognitive towards a more experiential mode, from an abstract to a concrete, transformational experience. It will be easy for us to take the normal trend of classroom learning -> tours -> immersion -> independent project as Gospel truth when you can create as system that jumps straight to exploration was what is normally done in the performing arts. Following an exploratory approach makes the learner responsible for his learning.  This also implies that a lot of courses taught in schools and universities are actually inefficient and ineffective.  

As innovators and technical professionals, it is to our best interest to determine the maturity of the technology we work with. This way we will be able to maximize the innovation that can be done with these. By predicting technology trends we will be able to take leadership of the great industries of tomorrow

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How to Make Sense of Ideality

In innovation, Ideality plays a very important role in the development of any system.  As a matter of fact, Ideality is the main driver of technological evolution.  In a previous post, I mentioned that Ideality is measured by the following equation:

Let us stop and think, however, as to what does this really mean?  The beauty of the ideality equation is that it can actually be expressed as a Benefit/Cost ratio although this really depends on the available information and the analysis required by the audience that requires the calculations.  The best scenario would be to express benefits in terms of potential revenue and harmful effects in terms of $ values.  Putting this $ value on Benefits may not always be possible considering a lot of inventions are really radical.   Some people consider it difficult to put values on Harmful Effects, but this task is actually easier to do than that for Benefits.

Based on my experience Harmful Effects are either Social ( involving Humans and Human settlements) or Ecological.  On this premise, we can then proceed towards using standard valuation paradigms on Social and Ecological impact.  We can go about doing this by estimating actual damage cost ( economic loss because of Social and Ecological damage),  adaptation cost (cost of deploying measures to help affected areas to cope with damage), mitigation cost ( cost of deploying measures to prevent the damage).  Deciding which cost to use is not that simple as detailed information needs to be assessed for each case.  It is however prudent to use the highest among the 3 costs in assessing the ideality of the system.    In the end, the numerator of the Ideality equation, is in fact, a triple bottom line expression of cost as that of Ecological Economics.

Ideality in Innovation

A great invention stems from considering the ideal state of a system under consideration. An Ideal product gives you all the benefits you want without any cost or harmful effects.  A good way to assess the ideality of a product is by means of the ideality equation:

Harmful effects may be equated either as damage costs, mitigation costs or adaptation costs. When technology is new, cost and harmful effects are high.  As maturity comes, these negative factors are minimized.