Recently I had an opportunity to learn about how technical experts interpret the term disruptive. I did not plan for this opportunity, nor did the experts know they would be compared or assessed in anyway, but the result was surprising. Here is what happened.
REbound recently submitted a grant application to raise R&D money. Each reviewer received the same grant containing roughly 20 pages of detailed technical description. They were all independently asked to review the merits of our application and were specifically asked to assess the impact the technology would have. After each had completed their review, the funding agency was kind enough to send us their comments and allow us to reply directly to any issues or confusions that the reviewers had before the funding agency makes their decision next month.
What was interesting about the comments was that, when asked how disruptive our technology was, each expert came back with a very different and contradictory answer. There responses were so disparate that if you saw them you would think that they had colluded to give the most inconsistent comments possible.
Now, for the purposes of this post, the actual disruptivivity of REbound’s technology does not actually matter. The fact is, 3 experts were given a detailed description of a technology in their area of expertise and were unable to consistently determine if the technology was or was not disruptive. Which raises an important question: does expert status in the state-of-the-art make you a good candidate to judge disruptivity in that same art? Based on this recent experience I would say no. In fact, I would go so far as to say it makes them one of the worst groups to ask.
How can this be? In short, it’s hubris. But first, lets have a quick review of disruption. Disruptive technology does not initially compete well in the industry it eventually disrupts. Comparing a disruptive technology to the state-of-the-art using the performance standards of the industry the state-of-the-art will always come out on top. The disruptive technology generally leverages superiority in some non-standard performance metric to gain traction in a smaller, less lucrative market. It then can use that market to improve its ability to meet industry standard metrics until it can disrupt the state-of-the-art technologies.
The issue here is that the state-of-the-art experts are too close to their own field. They know too much about the markets and the different technologies being developed to improve the state-of-the-art in those markets. To them, a disruptive technology just looks like a crappy product with applications to crappy markets. Their confidence in their own knowledge and an over reliance on state function assessments blind them to the fact that the technology they are looking at may one day burry the very technology they are trying to improve.
Really, hubris is too condescending of a word. It’s just human nature. When someone understands something very well, they get comfortable relying on pre-conceived ideas of their area of expertise. When something does not fit into what they already understand to be the current development trajectory of the state-of-the-art, it’s natural to reject it. Where a non-expert might look at the bigger picture, experts rely on their pre-conceived knowledge to quickly kill or promote ideas.
So we end up in a situation where 3 experts who are clearly familiar with the idea of disruptive technology are unable to come to any meaningful consensus about the disruptivity of technology in their area of expertise. For the experts, this issue is invisible. For the inventors, this issue is frustrating. But for the funding agency or investors trying to fund disruptive technology, this issue is downright misleading.
The solution? In part the solution is to ignore experts, but this probably does not sit well because, for all the non-disruptive technologies, the feedback from these experts is critical. It seems the only solution is then, as usual, to work harder; to get together more eyes to look at new technologies. Preferably these eyes would belong to non-experts devoid of pre-conceived technology paths and social constructs that discount disruptive technology development. Sounds like a lot of work!
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