Disruption leads to "Aha"

If there's one thing we are hearing repeatedly, overtly and interlaced, it is that resting on your achievements, no matter how impressive and lucrative, will cost you in the long run. Oftentimes innovation is borne of simplifying or going downmarket with your existing practices, but doing so can go well beyond the comfort zone of many companies. Unfortunately, cultivating these radical departures -- these disruptive technologies -- is difficult for companies to do in house while simultaneously investing in the status quo, largely because the two efforts are fundamentally at odds and consequently provoke internal conflict. This can be resolved by moving the disruptive efforts out of house and researching the collective intelligence of larger world.

Speaking of collective intelligence.....

Google trends can help you get a sense of the "buzz", especially when you search strategic word combinations, like "iphone" and "3G". iPhone users were searching for information on a good 6 months before Apple officially announced it.

To facilitate these strategic searches, O'Reilly Radar has a good track record of anticipating disruptive technologies. While somewhat long, I think their own words describe what they are about well:

At O'Reilly, a big part of our business is paying attention to what's new and interesting in the world of technology. We have a pretty good record at having anticipated some of the big technology developments in recent history. For instance, we launched the first commercial Web site, GNN, in 1993; we organized the meeting at which the term "open source" was first adopted; we were early investors in Blogger, which helped launch the blogging revolution; and more recently, our Web 2.0 conference launched a world-wide meme. We call this predictive sense the "O'Reilly Radar." And while we're certainly not always right, we are, at least, good at making interesting guesses.

Our methodology is simple: we draw from the wisdom of the alpha geeks in our midst, paying attention to what's interesting to them, amplifying these weak signals, and seeing where they fit into the innovation ecology. Add to that the original research conducted by our Research team, and you start to get a good picture of what the technology world is thinking about. What books are people just now starting to buy, and which are falling off in interest? Which tech-related Google AdWords are rising or falling in price? What can we learn from predictive markets tracking tech trends? What do help-wanted ads tell us about technology adoption?

Even more invasive than google trends (which may be a good or bad thing, depending on how you see it) is technorati which searches blogs for key words. With Four Seasons hotels' focus on spa, I checked out the activity on "spa". English posts that contain Spa per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!
Unfortunately I was unable to pull 180 days.

I leave you with this final thought - if the following were disruptive technologies, which would you invest in?
The battle of the starlets