Dean Landolt

It sure doesn’t feel like Spring on the east coast, but the new Spring semester began yesterday. Like the last few semesters, I’m taking the painfully heavy course load of three credit hours. It’s true, I’m lazy. I don’t know when I’ll ever finish this masters, but I sure won’t strain myself to get there!

Conveniently, the one class I’m enrolled in happens to be right up my alley. She’s called “Transformational Information Technologies” — which in my program could mean damn near anything, but thus far it seems like it’s right in my sweet spot. Also conveniently, the prof, Doug Oard, knows a helluvalot about the topic, and seems like a genuinely interesting and likable character. It’s conceivable we won’t spend the whole semester talking in incoherent academic generalities. With the first class, it didn’t take long for us to get into meat-and-bones discussions about ‘real’ things…

Near the end of class, after some interesting discussion on a range of topics, from privacy to disruptive tech, we had to break off into teams and try to think up and refine conceptual frameworks that would be useful in evaluating a given technology, or possibly a group of technologies in a given landscape. I’m still not clear on exactly what we’re supposed to evaluate and how, but ultimately, I think we’ll have to have a means to comprehend and try to predict the trajectory of a technology. Sure, that’s no easy feat, but futurists are like meteorologists — nobody expects you to be right (if they’re really like meteorologists, they’ll also berate you for going against the grain!).

The only framework I could conjure up where I could comfortably accept that it accurately captured the drivers for development and adoption of a technology was Eric Raymond’s cathedral and bazaar metaphor.

While I’m sure there are a laundry list of frameworks I could dig up that could aid in understanding technological advances, other than the CatB idea above, nothing I’ve seen really strikes a chord with me as reflective of real (read: market) forces.

By sheer luck, just this morning, another great idea fell out of the sky. HBS prof Andrew McAfee calls it the “flip test”, and in spite of it coming out of a B School, it actually seems practical. It goes a little something like this:

Let’s say the world has only e-books, then someone introduces this technology called ‘paper’. It’s cheap, portable, lasts essentially forever, and requires no batteries. You can’t write over it once it’s been written on, but you buy more very cheaply. Wouldn’t that technology come to dominate the market?

Joe goes on to draw other analogies with other eternal next big things like videophones and alternative fuels. This framework may not apply for every technology, but it could make for a great sniff test for the bullshit crutches futurists love to lean on (example from last night’s class: hovercars).

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This entry was posted Friday, January 26th, 2007 at 11:15 am and is filed under Academia, Technologism. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.