Creative Inventors

Disruptive technology

A disruptive technology is one that displaces an established technology and shakes up the industry or a ground-breaking product that creates a completely new industry.

Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen coined the term disruptive technology. In his 1997 best-selling book, "The Innovator's Dilemma," Christensen separates new technology into two categories: sustaining and disruptive. Sustaining technology relies on incremental improvements to an already established technology. Disruptive technology lacks refinement, often has performance problems because it is new, appeals to a limited audience and may not yet have a proven practical application. (Such was the case with Alexander Graham Bell's "electrical speech machine," which we now call the telephone.)

Here are a few examples of disruptive technologies:

The personal computer (PC) displaced the typewriter and forever changed the way we work and communicate.
The Windows operating system's combination of affordability and a user-friendly interface was instrumental in the rapid development of the personal computing industry in the 1990s. Personal computing disrupted the television industry, as well as a great number of other activities.
Email transformed the way we communicating, largely displacing letter-writing and disrupting the postal and greeting card industries.
Cell phones made it possible for people to call us anywhere and disrupted the telecom industry.
The laptop computer and mobile computing made a mobile workforce possible and made it possible for people to connect to corporate networks and collaborate from anywhere. In many organizations, laptops replaced desktops.
Smartphones largely replaced cell phones and PDAs and, because of the available apps, also disrupted: pocket cameras, MP3 players, calculators and GPS devices, among many other possibilities. For some mobile users, smartphones often replace laptops. Others prefer a tablet.
Cloud computing has been a hugely disruptive technology in the business world, displacing many resources that would conventionally have been located in-house or provided as a traditionally hosted service.
Social networking has had a major impact on the way we communicate and -- especially for personal use -- has disrupted telephone, email, instant messaging and event planning.

In his book, Christensen points out that large corporations are designed to work with sustaining technologies. They excel at knowing their market, staying close to their customers, and having a mechanism in place to develop existing technology. Conversely, they have trouble capitalizing on the potential efficiencies, cost-savings, or new marketing opportunities created by low-margin disruptive technologies. Using real-world examples to illustrate his point, Christensen demonstrates how it is not unusual for a big corporation to dismiss the value of a disruptive technology because it does not reinforce current company goals, only to be blindsided as the technology matures, gains a larger audience and market share and threatens the status quo.

Word of the day: Hyper-converged storage is a software-defined approach to storage management that combines storage, compute, networking and virtualization technologies in one physical unit that is managed as a single system.

Hyper-converged technologies appeal to storage managers because it gives them greater control over storage provisioning in a virtual server environment. In addition to providing administrators with single pane of glass management capabilities, hyper-converged storage nodes can be connected and scale out horizontally. This allows administrators to create a distributed storage infrastructure in which direct-attached storage (DAS) components from each physical server are combined to create a logical pool of disk capacity.

Hyper-converged solutions can be delivered either as appliances, providing both the hardware and the software, or as software-only products. The Nutanix Virtual Compute Platform and SimpliVity OmniCube were early players in the hyper-converged storage market. Maxta Software (Maxta Storage Platform), Scale Computing (HC3), VMware (Virtual SAN), Nimboxx (Atomic Unit Hardware) and Pivot3 (vSTAC) also have hyper-converged storage products.

Word of the day: Robert Morris worm

The Robert Morris worm is widely acknowledged as the first computer worm to be distributed across the Internet and the first computer virus to receive mainstream media attention.

Designed by Cornell graduate student Robert Tappan Morris, Jr., the Morris worm was released Nov. 2, 1988, from the MIT campus to disguise its point of origin. The 99-line program was reportedly an experiment Morris created to measure the size of the ARPANET.

The program's job was to record a statistic and search for other Internet-connected systems. However, a number of bugs and design flaws caused the program to target system vulnerabilities (namely the sendmail and finger implementations in Unix-based systems) and create more copies of itself than intended. This in turn caused buffer overflow and denial-of-service attacks on infected systems, rendering them useless within 90 minutes of initial infection.

In less than a day, the Morris worm affected approximately 10% of the 60,000 Internet-connected computers across the United States. Even if the infected systems were cleaned or rebooted, the worm would return and re-infect them. Each infection reportedly cost between $200 and $53,000 to remove and, according to the U.S. General Accounting Office, as much as $100 million may have been lost due to the Morris worm.

The Morris worm served as a wake-up call for the information security industry, drawing attention to the potential danger posed by computer viruses and the need for strong protections. It also resulted in the first conviction under the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act; Robert Morris was fined $10,000 and was sentenced to three years' probation and 400 hours of community service

Word of the day: V2V communication

Vehicle-to-vehicle communication is the wireless transmission of data between vehicles.
The goal of V2V communication is to prevent accidents by allowing motor vehicles in transit to send position and speed data to one another over an ad hoc mesh network. Depending upon how the technology is implemented, the vehicle's driver may simply receive a warning should there be a risk of an accident or the vehicle itself may take preemptive actions such as braking to slow down.

V2V communication is expected to be more effective than current automotive original equipment manufacturer (OEM) embedded systems for lane departure, adaptive cruise control, blind spot detection, rear parking sonar and backup camera because V2V technology enables an ubiquitous 360-degree awareness of surrounding threats. V2V communication is part of the growing trend towards pervasive computing, a concept known as the Internet of Things (IoT).

In the United States, V2V is an important part of the intelligent transport system (ITS), a concept that is being sponsored by the United States Department of Transportation (DOT) and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). An intelligent transport system will use the data from vehicle-to-vehicle communication to improve traffic management by allowing vehicles to also communicate with roadside infrastructure such as traffic lights and signs. The technology could become mandatory in the not-too-distant future and help put driverless-cars on highways across America.

The implementation of V2V communication and an intelligent transport system currently has three major roadblocks: the need for automotive manufacturers to agree upon standards, privacy concerns and funding. As of this writing it is unclear whether creation and maintenance of the supporting network would be publicly or privately funded. Automotive manufacturers working on ITS and V2V include GM, BMW, Audi, Daimler and Volvo.

70-20-10 rule

70-20-10 is a formula that describes how someone learns to do their job.The formula, which was developed by Morgan McCall, Robert Eichinger and Michael Lombardo at the Center for Creative Leadership, proposes that on average, 70% of a person's learning at work is internal and experience-based, 20% comes from interacting with fellow employees and 10% is the result of formal training and reading.

In human resources, the 70-20-10 rule is often used to define the ideal balance for how to provide corporate learning and staff development opportunities. 70% of training should take place while on the job, 20% should be conducted informally through mentoring programs and 10% should be conducted formally through training sessions.

Although learning management systems (LMSes) have traditionally been used to deliver the 10% portion of the 70-20-10 formula, some systems can now support the 20% by providing employees with the ability to collaborate and the 70% by providing employees with learning opportunities when necessity demands it, a concept called just-in-time training.