Digital Darwinism summary

If there’s one thing for certain, it’s that the future is uncertain. Sure, there are a lot of people willing to sound foolish by trying to predict the future, but no one can be truly certain of what lies ahead. That said, we can look to the past and learn a lot about what to expect in the years ahead.

If we look back over our recent history, we can recognize three important eras that demonstrate a pattern in how businesses respond to new technology. By looking at the advent of electricity and computers, we can see that we’re in the middle of a very similar era regarding the internet.

Clayton Christensen, a Harvard Business School academic, described disruption in the business world as a new company that comes along with a new technology and a lower price to undermine the legacy companies. But this description doesn’t quite fit.   

When you think of some of the biggest disruptors in recent years, like Uber or Airbnb, you can see that these businesses didn’t have a lower price and nor did they just bring along some new technology. After all, Airbnb customers might spend more than they would for a traditional hotel. What disruptors really do is completely rethink the way of doing things, be it running a car service or operating in the hospitality industry. In other words, they shift the paradigm and fundamentally change how people do things.

You don’t necessarily have to be a new business in order to disrupt your industry. In fact, there are essentially four ways for any established business to change and be innovative.

The first is self-disruption, which means investing in a technology or way of doing things that would, if successful, make your current process obsolete. This is also referred to as “cannibalism” in the business world and, while it can be risky and difficult, it can also pay off big time.

Just as it was clear that streaming video was the way of the future over a decade ago, we can also make some safe assumptions about the future growth of other emerging digital technologies.

When exploring what the next big thing will be, it helps to try and see one or two steps down the road. For instance, when smartphones emerged, the real innovative minds looked to the further implications of this technology, like the apps and emojis and all the different secondary business opportunities that the smartphone would unleash.

One of the reasons Amazon’s one-button-purchase option is so impressive is that it understands the difference between shopping and buying. While businesses can try to make shopping a memorable experience, more forward-thinking businesses should consider what Amazon has done and make the buying experience as quick, painless and unmemorable as possible. 

If a buying experience is memorable, it’s usually because it was a bad experience. A good buying experience is effortless and easy, like taking care of the entire process with one push of a button.