One of the management classes that I am taking at Sloan is Disruptive Technology, taught by my thesis advisor Prof. James Utterback. This class talks about how innovative technologies and ideas can change the dynamics of market. Can new companies create opportunities by exploiting a new idea? How about incumbents? Wang and Digital, the big names of yesteryears, were once the dominant player in their respective markets but where are they now? For the incumbent companies, does the adoption new technologies, designs, or process ensure growth or even survival? These are some of the questions that are tackled in the class. I have to say that Prof. Utterback always has something very insightful to say while still offering students a fair share of thought-provoking questions for them to ponder.
Last Tuesday, as Ilana had already mentioned on her blog, Prof. Utterback delivered a lecture that provided some great insights to an industry that was created by innovative entrepreneurs eventually died because it got displaced by another technology. You would think that Prof. Utterback would draw an example from the high-technology industry given the highly technical oriented environment like MIT. On the contrary, he talked about the ice packing industry of the late 1800's - something that I initially thought was uninteresting. However, by the end of the lecture, I have to say that was perhaps one of the best lectures I have heard at MIT. During the lecture, Prof. Utterback highlighted a lot of observations that we had covered in the framework that we learned earlier in the term about analyzing the market. While it is not as good as listening to the lecture in person, you can still read about the ice industry here.
There's another consequence of this lecture. After dragging my feet on composing a thesis proposal to Prof. Utterback for the last few weeks, I finally had an epiphany on the missing hypothesis for my thesis after last Tuesday's lecture. I hope to think more about it and complete a draft my thesis proposal by this weekend.
| 3/9/2006 8:09:25 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00) |
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